You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hume. Sometimes when we talk about and hear about the climate crisis, the ideas kind of get abstracted. But one communicator has done a lot to wake up the public about what it means for us as humans. It's climate advocate Al Gore, and in his latest talk at the

Countdown Summit in 2021, he uses his trademark analogies and wit to break down the scale of what's

happening and issue an urgent call to action. So the climate crisis in my way of thinking about it,

is the most serious manifestation of an underlying collision

between human civilization as we've presently organized it

and the Earth's ecological systems.

And the system most in jeopardy

is the very thin shell of atmosphere

surrounding our planet,

because we're spewing 162 million tons of human-caused global warming pollution

into it every single day,

as if this is an open sewer.

It's not an open sewer.

It's so thin that if you could drive an automobile at

autobond speeds to the top of that blue shell, you'd reach it in about five minutes. And that's

where all the greenhouse gases are. The accumulated amount coming from the burning of fossil fuels

primarily, CO2, fastest growing source of methane is from fossil fuels

as well. The accumulated amount traps as much heat now as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class

atomic bombs exploding every day. So the temperatures are going up at almost record levels every year. Last year was the hottest

year in recorded history, according to NASA. And the scientists say it's absolutely unequivocal that

we are the cause of that. And we're hearing Mother Nature and seeing the extreme events. The most

anomalous extreme event since records began 200 years ago

...