The Guardian

Keeping world leaders waiting for half an hour and then giving them a fart joke suggest the PM hasn’t quite got Cop26

When one of the themes of your speech is that the clock is at one minute to midnight and you have 60 seconds left to save the world, it’s not the best look to come on stage 30 minutes later than planned. Better late than never isn’t quite the message of Cop26. The time for dawdling has been and gone. Countries need to act now. But then maybe Boris Johnson and the other world leaders were experiencing the same problems getting into the Glasgow venue as all the other punters.

Johnson is something of a late convert to the reality of the climate crisis. We know that and he knows that. He’s even admitted it was only when he got to Downing Street and academics walked him through the science that the penny really dropped. So you might have thought the prime minister would have chosen to play it fairly straight in welcoming everyone to Glasgow. Just thank them all for coming and make them aware of the responsibility they carry for saving the planet.

Summary of the main developments on kick-off day of the UN climate summit in Glasgow

The main things that happened on day one of the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow included:

It’s one minute to midnight on the doomsday clock 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 get serious about it tomorrow.

In my lifetime, I have witnessed a terrible decline. In yours, you could and should witness a wonderful recovery.

US president, Joe Biden, has warned that the climate crisis poses an 'existential threat to human existence as we know it' in his remarks to fellow world leaders at Cop26 in Glasgow. Biden urged other leaders to embark upon a transformational shift to clean energy

• Cop26 – follow for the latest live updates

Landmark Cops succeeded through leadership and hard graft – something the prime minister’s optimism has blinded him to

When the UK landed the Cop26 presidency two years ago, Boris Johnson sensed a huge opportunity to showcase the UK on the world stage. The conference fit his post-Brexit vision of a “global Britain”, free of the EU and still a player on the world stage.

He believed “Glasgow” would be remembered as a historic gathering, like the previous landmark climate summits in Kyoto and Paris. As recently as the end of September, Johnson told the UN general assembly in New York that the Glasgow summit should be a “turning point”. But then a week ago he began to scale down expectations, admitting success was “touch and go”.

Mujtaba Rahman is the managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm

‘Right now, we are falling short,’ US president says, urging other world leaders to embark upon a shift to clean energy

• Cop26 – follow for the latest live updates

Joe Biden has warned that the climate crisis poses “the existential threat to human existence as we know it” and urged other world leaders to embark upon a transformational shift to clean energy, as questions linger over the US president’s ability to deliver this vision at home.

Biden, addressing a sparse chamber at crucial UN climate talks that have begun in a frigid and drizzly Glasgow, said that the conference must act as a “kickoff of a decade of ambition and innovation to preserve our shared future”.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned that humanity was ‘digging its own grave’ as the Cop26 climate talks opened in Glasgow. He was joined by Boris Johnson, Prince Charles, Sir David Attenborough and the Barbados prime minister, Mia Amor Mottley – all of whom delivered a scathing critique of world leaders’ efforts so far to cut greenhouse gas emissions and stave off climate breakdown

• Climate optimism is an illusion, UN chief tells Cop26
• Cop26 – latest updates

Images from the 2021 United Nations climate change conference in Scotland’s biggest city

• Cop26 latest news – live

Complaints about wait to get in hints at poor organisation at multinational summit

• Cop26 – latest updates

Queues, icy weather, and more queues; as Glasgow’s climate conference kicked off the actual meetings, organisation and admissions continued to be a problem.

A couple thousand delegates and journalists were kept in large crowds queuing outside the conference centre, with Guardian reporters noting that there seemed to have been a lack of planning as no attempt was made to encourage people to queue rather than simply press forward.

Sir David Attenborough tells world leaders that the Earth's future is defined by a single number: the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. Speaking at the opening ceremony of Cop26 in Glasgow, the veteran naturalist urges leaders to 'rewrite our story' and 'turn this tragedy into a triumph'. He adds: 'We are, after all, the greatest problem solvers to have ever existed on Earth'

• Cop26 – latest updates

Broadcaster appeals for summit to commit to 1.5C temperature limit to avoid climate catastrophe

• Cop26 – latest updates

Sir David Attenborough has called on leaders at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow to be “motivated by hope rather than fear” to avoid climate catastrophe.

Speaking in front of an audience that included the US president, Joe Biden, at the conference’s opening ceremony on Monday afternoon, the broadcaster and naturalist said humanity was “already in trouble”.

António Guterres says talks may have to become annual and urges countries to ‘choose ambition’

• Cop26 – latest updates

Optimistic assessments of progress on tackling the climate crisis were “an illusion”, the UN secretary general has said in a scathing critique of world leaders’ efforts so far to cut greenhouse gas emissions and stave off climate breakdown.

António Guterres, greeting leaders gathering for the Cop26 summit, roundly dismissed the suggestion that the climate situation was improving, and he exhorted the more than 120 heads of government to “choose to safeguard our future and save humanity” instead of continuing with the addiction to fossil fuels.

The world needs to cut 28bn tonnes of emissions, current pledges only come to 4bn. Leaders cannot shy from this reality

• Ed Miliband is the shadow secretary for business, energy and industry

The defining choice facing leaders in Glasgow this week at Cop26 is whether to sugar-coat reality or be honest about the climate emergency, and demand the action that will be necessary to confront it. If we are to have any chance of preventing catastrophe, we must choose truth and candour.

The most important truth is the maths. For all the millions of words spilled about this summit, not enough has been done to spell out its central task. Many leaders say we need to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, but few say out loud what that means.

As Cop26 gets under way in Glasgow, I can’t help but reflect on the UK government’s very un-green budget

• Jonathan Wittenberg is rabbi of New North London synagogue

Two thousand years ago, Ecclesiastes taught that even a king is subservient to the soil. That includes prime ministers and chancellors; we are all dependent on and an interdependent part of nature.

Never before has there been a time when it is so urgent to budget for the benefit of the Earth. I am one of millions who imagined that Boris Johnson’s promise last year to “build back greener” was truly intended. I expected that the government of the country, entrusted with hosting Cop26 – the most important gathering ever for the future of our planet – would show that it means what it says and put its money where its slogans are.

Campaigners warn Brazil may make empty promises at Cop26 to gain access to conservation money

Amazon forest defenders are urging delegates at Cop26 not to trust the “greenwashing” promises of Jair Bolsonaro’s government, which has wreaked havoc on the environment over the past three years.

Brazil will field one of the biggest delegations at the UN climate talks in Glasgow and fund a lavish promotional pavilion inside the conference centre. According to the agriculture minister, Tereza Cristina Corrêa da Costa Dias, and the environment minister, Joaquim Alvaro Pereira Leite, the message is that Brazil is “a longtime champion of the environmental agenda and an agrifood powerhouse”.

Save the Children has been documenting the stories of children living on the frontline of the climate crisis, sending world-renowned photographers to Cambodia, Australia and Pakistan to learn about their lives

My rage against the senator might consume me if I couldn’t set it down here

Late in the evening on Friday 15 October an alert appeared on my phone that seemed at last to portend the end of the world. Two weeks before the UN climate summit in Glasgow – a make-or-break moment for American leadership and international ambition – Senator Joe Manchin had decided to gut our country’s best, and perhaps last, attempt to save itself. With three decades left to decarbonize the global economy, and a window of Democratic control unlikely to recur for years, Manchin’s benefactors in the coal and gas industry had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, killing the Clean Electricity Performance Program that would finally have brought their lucrative global arson spree under control.

It was hard not to feel like this was game over, a sensation I’d grown accustomed to after a decade working in the American climate movement. It was the same feeling I’d had after the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks, and the defeat of the Waxman-Markey bill, and the election of a president willing to drown the world to buoy his ego. But though each of those moments felt crushing, the news on the 15th felt worse.

Address by leader of world’s biggest polluter will be uploaded to conference website

• Cop26 begins as world leaders descend on Glasgow – live

China’s president, Xi Jinping, will address the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow on Monday in the form of a written statement.

An official schedule said Xi’s statement would be uploaded to the conference website following addresses by world leaders, including his US and French counterparts Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron.

Leaders and delegates from around the world are arriving in Glasgow for a crucial conference on tackling the climate crisis. Follow the latest here

World leaders are beginning to arrive at the SEC, where they are being greeted by UK prime minister Boris Johnson.

Many were disappointed when it was confirmed that the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, would not attend in person, as although he has not left China since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic some feared it might signal a lack of ambition from China.

After a public outcry, the Tories are realising that effluent-dumping water companies need more than a ticking off

The groundswell of disgust over water firms dumping raw human sewage into England’s rivers and seas has grown into a roiling tsunami threatening to overwhelm the government. By their own confession, water companies say they dumped untreated sewage into English water bodies more than 400,000 times last year, for a total of about 3.1m hours.

As shocking as that seems, you can safely assume this figure grossly underplays the true picture because not all sewage discharges are recorded, and because the sector is allowed to self-report its spills, a practice that begs to be abused.

Rachel Salvidge is an environmental journalist and deputy editor of the ENDS Report

I have spent much of my career focused on the environment. I know we have the tools and technology to beat this crisis

The most important thing to say is that we can still beat the crisis – but we are against the clock. Emissions are piling up in the atmosphere every day that goes by, so we’re in a race against time to act. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

There is no moment in time when we go from a world that’s fine to a world that’s a disaster. But every action, by every person, matters. Every bit of heating you prevent reduces human and planetary suffering, because that’s really what this will come down to.