What might Greta Thunberg say about the upcoming United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP26) summit being held in Glasgow from 31 October to 12 November? Probably—if the recent speech she gave at the UN Youth4Climate conference in Italy is anything to go by—it would be something like: “blah, blah, blah”. “They’ve now had 30 years”, she said, “of blah, blah, blah. And where has that led us? Over 50 percent of all our CO2 emissions have occurred since 1990, and a third since 2005.”

The climate crisis is raging across the Northern Hemisphere. Fires stretch from Algeria and Spain to Palestine, from Siberia to Ontario. Floods have killed hundreds in China and India and displaced thousands more. Three of the biggest countries in the world—Russia, the US and Canada—have been blanketed with smoke. So too, for the first time ever, was the north pole.