COP26: Emmanuel Macron meets Boris Johnson in Glasgow
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Mr Johnson was addressing 120 world leaders at the COP26 climate conference. He compared the current situation to James Bond deactivating a ticking timebomb device and said it was still possible to save the world from a catastrophe. But Mr Johnson said it was now “too late” to fix everything and urgent work needed to be done to address the most concerning problems the world faces.
He said: “Welcome to Scotland, whose most globally famous fictional son, is almost certainly a man called James Bond, who almost always comes to the climax of his films strapped to a doomsday device.
“He desperately tries to figure out what wire to cut as a red doomsday clock ticks down remorsefully to a destination that will end human life as we know it.
“We are in the same position. My fellow global leaders, we are James Bond today.
“Except, the tragedy is, this is not a movie and the doomsday device is real.
“The clock is ticking to the rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines of which we are pumping carbon into the air at record levels.”
Mr Johnson pointed out that human-made emissions are causing global warming to accelerate at an alarming rate and that things could get worse.
He added: “We are coating the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2 – raising the temperature of the planet at a speed that is entirely man-made.
“Two degrees more and we jeopardise food supply for hundreds of millions, three degrees and you can add twice as many droughts and wildfires, four degrees and we say goodbye to whole cities.
“The longer we fail to act, the worse it gets and the higher the price when we are eventually forced to act.
“Humanity has run down the doomsday clock. It’s one minute to midnight and we need to act now.
“If we don’t get serious about climate change today it will be too late for our children to do tomorrow.”
But the Prime Minister offered world leaders a lifeline.
He added: “We can make this moment the one where we get real on climate. We can do it on coal, cars, cash and trees.
“We have the technology to deactivate the ticking doomsday device.
“Not all at once, it’s too late for that, but one by one we can begin to close down hydrocarbon production.”
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