PM compares climate change to James Bond movie as he opens COP26
Boris Johnson said world leaders are in "roughly the same position" as the fictional spy
Boris Johnson has urged world leaders not to "fluff our lines", warning that younger generations will "not forgive us", as he made his opening speech at the COP26 summit in Glasgow.
The Prime Minister said: "The children who will judge us are children not yet born, and their children.
"We are now coming centre stage before a vast and uncountable audience of posterity and we must not fluff our lines or miss our cue.
"Because if we fail, they will not forgive us - they will know that Glasgow was the historic turning point when history failed to turn.
"They will judge us with bitterness and with a resentment that eclipses any of the climate activists of today and they will be right.
"Cop26 will not and cannot be the end of the story on climate change."
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Mr Johnson said there is a duty to find the funds pledged at a previous climate summit Paris.
He told the Cop26 conference in Glasgow: "We cannot and will not succeed by government spending alone.
"We in this room could deploy hundreds of billions, no question. But the market has hundreds of trillions and the task now is to work together to help our friends to decarbonise."
He went on to compare the current situation in the climate crises to “Scotland’s most globally famous fictional son”, saying world leaders are "in roughly the same position" as James Bond.
Bond, he said, "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".
He added: "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.
"The clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and furnaces and engines with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster... and quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2, raising the temperature of the planet with a speed and abruptness that is entirely man made."
Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned of the dangers of rising temperatures as he opened the Cop26 global climate summit in Glasgow.
He said: "Four degrees and we say goodbye to whole cities, Miami, Alexandria Shanghai, all lost beneath the waves.
"The longer we fail to act and the worse it gets and the higher the price when we are forced by catastrophe to act."
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