Action? Or just ‘blah, blah, blah?’

“Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah. Climate neutral. Blah, blah, blah.” It has been a month since eco-warrior Greta Thunberg once again stormed the climate action stage and once again demonstrated the excoriating power of her straight talk. The platform was the Youth4Climate conference in Milan, but the target was unquestionably the looming global climate conference, COP26, which starts on Oct. 31 in Glasgow.

“This is all we hear from our so-called leaders: words,” Thunberg went on to say. “We’ve had 30 years of their blah, blah, blah.”

That’s the shrewdly placed soundbite against which the two-week summit will be measured: more words that drift far into the future? Or clear, measurable, near-term actions?

Long-term promises have been the hallmark of the annual gathering, postponed last year due to the pandemic. Time for such smoke-blowing is up. As John Kerry, the U.S. special envoy on climate change, said this week, Glasgow is the “last best hope” to act now to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis. “We have to get on the road here and we’ve been talking about it for 30 years,” he told BBC News.

Tragically, it’s never been easier to itemize real world examples of a world on the brink. As sandstorms silt up croplands in Madagascar, the United Nations warns that the country is teetering on the edge of the world’s first climate change famine, its starving population having done nothing to contribute to the climate catastrophe.

The heatwave-trapping heat dome that clamped down on Canada’s west coast and down the Pacific Northwest in July shot temperatures above 40 C and took hundreds of lives.

Our oceans are hotter than ever in history. Scientists at the University of British Columbia have been documenting the monumental die-off of seashore animals along the Salish Sea coastline.

Global warming will cause sea levels to rise by as much as a metre by century’s end if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t slashed, and fast, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A boldface headline in a recent report from the panel is useful: “Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in 2,000 years.”

The European Commission projects close to 100,000 yearly fatalities in Europe from extreme heat if global warming rises by three degrees Celsius by the end of the century. What is currently deemed a 50-year heatwave occurrence in Spain could occur annually, and lethally, in that scenario.

And so on and so on. One hardly knows where to stop. When the United Nations launched its first Conference of the Parties, or COP, all those years ago, the scientific evidence was far less clear.

In 2015, 191 countries, plus the European Union, came together at COP21 to sign a legally binding international treaty committing to more ambitious climate action to reduce emissions and adapt to climate impacts. The Paris Agreement was hailed for setting long-term goals directed at limiting the global temperature rise to well below two degrees while pursuing “efforts” to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. Commitments — such a soft word — were to be reviewed every five years.

Yet greenhouse gas emissions are rising and the world remains on course toward three degrees of global warming. Just this week the United Nations revealed that governments, despite their lofty “ambitions,” still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with the 1.5-degree target.

No wonder Greta Thunberg is fed up with the rhetoric. On Wednesday she tweeted a link to that UN report. “It can no longer be possible for politicians to get away with ignoring the gap between their words and actions,” she wrote. That’s inarguable. The challenge for COP26 will lie in making a convincing case that fast action will at long last be taken.

Saturday: COP26 – The politics, the players and the obstacles to success.

Our oceans are hotter than ever in history ... Greenhouse gas emissions are rising and the world remains on course toward three degrees of global warming