Glasgow de-Rangers

If schizophrenia is loss of touch with reality, the men in white coats must be working overtime in Glasgow.

The proceedings at and around COP26 evoke late Fellini films at their most morbid. Lunatics aren’t just running the asylum, they are running the whole city – and tomorrow ze world.

Great Thunberg was in town, having insisted she came by train, not walked across the North Sea all the way from Sweden. That disappointed her admirers who are sure she possesses the requisite ability.

Greta, her agued eyes offset by a rather sinister smile, then proved that no formal education is needed to acquire a fluent command of a foreign language. Pointing at the conference building with a thespian sweep, Greta said: “No more exploitation, no more blah blah blah, no more whatever the fuck they are doing inside there.”

She then led her supporters in a rousing chorus of “You can shove your climate crisis up your arse!”

Greta’s impatience is understandable. Rather than wasting time on chewing the cud, all those country leaders should roll up their sleeves and expurgate every molecule of CO₂ from the atmosphere. And they must do so straight away, not in decades, years or even months.

If the rebuked politicians get their collective finger out and obey the command so elegantly expressed, they are facing a tall task.

The task may also be thankless, considering that CO₂ accounts for only one in 85,000 molecules of the atmosphere, with just three per cent of them anthropogenic. Yet by some unidentified magic, eliminating this tiny trace of a trace gas is supposed to save the world from being alternately shallow-fried and flooded.

The aforementioned leaders are bargaining with one another about the earliest date they can put their divine powers into effect. Boris Johnson is in the leading pack, having committed Britain to going carbon-neutral by 2050.

With his verbose flair, the PM spoke metaphorically of a doomsday device ticking away, ready to go off with an almighty bang. The world, he said, has “long since run the clock down on climate change”. The clock now shows “one minute to midnight”, he added, looking at his expensive watch for visual effect.

Mr Johnson thus went those street-corner preachers one better. Those troubled individuals bang their drums, shouting that the end of the world is nigh. But, unlike our PM, they can’t pinpoint that unfortunate demise to any particular timeframe. He can. Not only is the end of the world coming, but Mr Johnson knows exactly when.

But fear not: he also knows that Doomsday can be averted by expurgating three per cent of one molecule in 85,000, thereby selflessly destroying the British economy for the good of the planet. Every country must do her bit, even if her bit amounts to 1.1 per cent of global carbon emissions, as Britain’s does.

India’s bit is much larger, putting her in the bronze medal position, behind only China and the US, in the race towards Doomsday. That’s why Boris was disappointed with his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi.

Mr Modi is aware of the approaching disaster, but his mental clock shows an earlier time than five to midnight. That’s why he’s only ready to commit his country to destroying its economy by 2070, not Britain’s more responsible 2050.

That’s not good enough, complained Boris. Couldn’t they split the difference, with India joining China in pledging 2060 as the cut-off point? No, they couldn’t, objected Mr Modi.

India is still a developing country, he explained not unreasonably. And, before an edifice can be pulled down it has to be built first. Hence India’s economy won’t be ready for destruction until 2070 at the earliest.

Mr Modi, being an infidel, thus proved he is denied direct access to God, which privilege can be institutionally claimed by Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Trained to express himself in the scriptural idiom of parables, metaphors and similes, His Grace warned that the world is facing a “genocide on an infinitely greater scale” than that suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Failure to prevent this Holocaust Mark II would leave world leaders forever cursed, added His Grace, although he refrained from putting himself forth as the one to administer said curse ex cathedra.

Even so, his little simile upset Jewish organisations and others who feel called upon to be upset for any reason whatsoever. The outcry was so loud that the good archbishop immediately grovelled: “I unequivocally apologise for the words I used when trying to emphasise the gravity of the situation facing us at COP26,” he wrote.

He should have stood his ground with the courage and fortitude displayed by Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, his Anglican precursors who suffered a fiery death for their Protestant beliefs.

If I were His Grace, I would have referred to them rather than the Jews, comparing global warming to the pyre outside Oxford’s Balliol College. But even the comparison with the Holocaust could have been defended on purely numerical grounds.

After all, only six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Global warming, on the other hand, could incinerate the entire world population that at the moment stands at 7.9 billion. And it’ll probably double by 2070, the year by which Mr Modi undertook to avert the impending catastrophe.

Messrs Xi and Putin callously saw fit to give COP a miss. They thus denied themselves the chance to hear our PM’s peroration stating that there are “no compelling excuses for our procrastination”.

He agreed with Greta that the actions taken so far amount to “drops in a rapidly warming ocean”, thus proving that the same passionate message could be delivered without resorting to obscenities.

Joe Biden could have heard the soliloquy but didn’t. He dozed off, looking peaceful and untroubled in his slumber.