Cop26 climate change summit: Queen Elizabeth's irritation with politician's lack of action helps make a useful point – Scotsman comment

15 days to Cop26: It wasn’t meant for public consumption, but Queen Elizabeth’s remark that “it's really irritating when they talk, but they don't do” summed up frustration with the lack of real action to address climate change by world leaders almost as pithily as Greta Thunberg’s “blah, blah, blah” comment.

It also usefully helps to point out what should be obvious: politicians who pay lip-service to cutting carbon emissions while failing to bring in the necessary policies to enable this to actually happen are hardly much better than those who deny that global warming is a problem.

With the scientific evidence being so well-established and so strong, there are fewer of the latter around these days but some may be masquerading as the former to maintain a degree of credibility.

The Queen’s concern about who is going to come to the UN’s COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow may have been assuaged by the news that, among others, US President Joe Biden and Australian premier Scott Morrison, who suggested he might skip it, will both be there. And while China's President Xi Jinping is reportedly not going to attend, a delegation from Beijing certainly will do.

But their physical presence is not necessarily the most important thing. If they are not there in spirit with the need to stop global warming going above 1.5 degrees Celsius – the point at which climate change starts to become particularly “dangerous” with the potential to cross tipping points that lead to irreversible changes – they might as well not be there at all.

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