Boris Johnson today opened COP26 with a desperate plea to humanity to “defuse the bomb” of climate change like James Bond.
The Prime Minister invoked the fictional Scottish spy in a glittering opening ceremony as he spoke to 120 world leaders in Glasgow.
Speaking alongside the UN Secretary General, Prince Charles and Sir David Attenborough, he said Scotland was “the very place where the doomsday machine began to tick” with the invention of the steam engine.
Urging world leaders to “build a life boat for humanity” after G20 leaders missed key targets, he said the summit must be “the moment when humanity finally began to defuse that bomb”.
But he announced no new policies except £3bn of climate finance. Targets to get Net Zero emissions by 2050 and $100bn a year of climate finances have been fudged; and China, Russia and Brazil aren't turning up to the summit.
Greenpeace UK's Rebecca Newsom said: "Today's announcement about UK climate finance is a complete distraction as it's not new money and it’s not even guaranteed.
“Meanwhile, Johnson has left the door open to new oil and gas licences.
“We hope world leaders listen to Johnson’s warnings, but maybe he needs to listen to them himself."
UN Secretary General António Guterres told the opening ceremony there must be "enough of killing ourselves with carbon, enough of treating nature like a toilet.
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"Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper - we are digging our own graves."
Mr Guterres said we are "careering towards climate catastrophe" with questions over nations' recent pledges. "We are still headed for climate disaster", he said, adding: “Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink.
“We face a stark choice - either we stop it, or it stops us. And it’s time to say ‘enough’.”
For island nations, he said, "failure is not an option. Failure is a death sentence."
The opening ceremony heard from people in island nations and rainforests that face existential destruction if global temperatures rise too high.
Prince Charles - who took a brief stumble when walking onto the stage - repeated his plea for the world to spend trillions of dollars a year on climate help.
The heir to the throne told leaders: "We have to put ourselves on what might be called a war-like footing."
And beloved naturalist Sir David Attenborough told the conference to a dramatic, doomsday-like soundtrack: "We are already in trouble.
The 95-year-old urged humanity to "rewrite our story - to turn this tragedy into a triumph" - and was given a standing ovation by US President Joe Biden.
Boris Johnson urged leaders to phase out petrol and diesel cars by 2035; end coal-fired power stations by 2040 in poorer countries and 2030 in richer ones; plant hundreds of millions of trees and "halt and reverse deforestation by 2030."
Rambling briefly off-topic he said: "“We all talk about what we’re going to do in 2050, in 2060.
"The average age of this conclave of world leaders I’m afraid to say, is over 60. I fully intend to be alive in 2060. I will be a mere 94 years old, even if I’m not still in Downing Street. You never know...
"But the children who will judge us are children not yet born, and their children."
Referring to James Bond, the PM said: “He generally comes to the climax of his highly lucrative films strapped to a doomsday device, desperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn it off, while a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it.
“We are in roughly the same position, my fellow global leaders, as James Bond today.
“Except that the tragedy is this is not a movie - and the Doomsday Device is real.
“And the clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster, record outputs.
“And quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2, raising the temperature of the planet with a speed and an abruptness that is entirely man made.”
The Prime Minister spoke after he spent three hours elbow-bumping more than 120 world leaders at the opening of COP26 in Glasgow.
Watched the leaders of the US, France, Canada, India and many more, he told the world it is at “one minute to midnight” and must act now to avert a climate catastrophe.
The opening event was due to be followed by speeches by world leaders including Joe Biden, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron this afternoon.
World leaders mingled and milled around with little security ahead of the speech, stopping for selfies with more junior delegates.
The UK's trade minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan took a selfie in front of the stage while Foreign Secretary Liz Truss chatted to EU chief Ursula von der Leyen.
Under cool blue lights they watched a Scottish piper, poetry and a video narrated by TV astronomer Brian Cox explaining how there “may only ever be one” civilisation in the Milky Way galaxy - “we may be the first and last”.
But the climate summit got off to a rocky start after G20 leaders stopped short of agreeing ambitious new targets in Rome.
At the G20 summit yesterday they pledged only to get to Net Zero emissions “by or around” the middle of the century, not 2050.
And they scrubbed a pledge to halt new coal power stations, instead ending financing for other countries’ coal plants overseas.
Pledges to donate $100billion a year to poorer nations have fallen three years behind target, despite the UK announcing £1bn today.
This lunchtime the UK announced it will deliver £3bn in climate financing for green growth in developing countries over five years - twice as much as in 2017-2021.
But campaigners warned the sum was only a tiny part of the solution and the leaders of China, Turkey, Brazil and Russia all refused to come to the summit in person.
Last night glum Mr Johnson confessed the world was currently “not going to hit” its goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
One senior UK source told the Mirror it would be a success "if we can get closer to 2C than we are to 3C" - even though that would mean devastating flooding, wildfires and rising sea-levels.
Last night the Prime Minister complained some other developed countries were “not yet doing their fair share of the work”.
These include China, Saudi Arabia and Russia which have only committed to reaching net zero by 2060, while India and Australia have joined Beijing in continuing to back coal.
Mr Johnson told them: "If we are going to prevent COP26 from being a failure, then that must change.
“If Glasgow fails then the whole thing fails. The Paris Agreement will have crumbled at the first reckoning.
“The world’s only viable mechanism for dealing with climate changed will be holed beneath the water line.”
Meanwhile there was chaos for many of the 25,000 delegates trying to attend the summit in a huge closed-off area of the Scottish city.
Both the UK’s north-south rail lines were hit by closures on Sunday due to a fallen tree as Britain suffered from stormy weather.
That forced hundreds of delegates to book last-minute, short-haul domestic flights from London to the Scottish city.
Queue of hundreds of people formed for taxis at Glasgow Airport late on Sunday night as there is no direct train line to the centre.
This morning there were then queues of 90 minutes to get into the only entrance for the enormous summit site.
World leaders including those of the UK, India and US all flew in on generously-sized jets from Rome to Glasgow.
President Joe Biden arrived in the Scottish city with his vast convoy, while side streets filled with idling chauffeur-driven cars.
And a strong wind blew half-down a gigantic banner on the Finnieston crane, welcoming delegates to the summit.
The summit until November 12 is meant to build on commitments made by countries at a key Paris summit in 2015.
Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon has said she shares the PM's pessimism over the climate talks but urged leaders to "put our shoulders to the wheel".
But Shadow climate change minister Ed Miliband told LBC: "The Prime Minister, in a rather sort of lastminute.gov kind of way, has kind of woken up to how hard this is and is now saying ‘we’re not where we need to be.’
“Well, it’s good that he’s saying that now, I kind of wish he’d been saying it a little bit earlier."
Mr Johnson will this afternoon have a series of bilateral meetings with the leaders of India and Indonesia, two of the world' biggest polluters.
After, he will host an event bringing together large emitter nations and some of the most vulnerable countries to climate change.
This evening, the PM will join world leaders and members of the Royal family for a glittering reception.
The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said nations had a moral duty to act, adding: "It is absolutely a moral issue.
“This is our neighbours all around the world, those who are already suffering catastrophic impacts, this is life or death."
