The world is in the “same position as James Bond” the Prime Minister Boris Johnson has today told global leaders at critical climate change talks, regarded as the world’s “last, best hope” to avoid devastating environmental breakdown.

The fictional Scottish character usually reaches the climax of the film, “strapped to a Doomsday device”, desperately trying to work out which to chord to pull to avoid “a detonation that will end human life as we know,” said Johnson.

“And we are in roughly the same position, my fellow global leaders, as James Bond today,” he told an audience that includes US President Joe Biden, outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen among roughly 120 world leaders.

“Except that the tragedy is this is not a movie and the doomsday device is real,” the PM said.

“And the clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster.”

Johnson warned it is “one minute to midnight” on that Doomsday device, warning that if we don’t get serious on climate change today, “it will be too late for our children to do so tomorrow”.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres then took the stage, who warned: “Failure is not an option. Failure is a death sentence.”

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Prince Charles and Sir David Attenborough and the Italian PM Mario Draghi will also deliver speeches in the COP26 opening ceremony.

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The UK as host of the talks wants the aim to be “keeping 1.5C degrees” alive.

Under the Paris Agreement, made at COP21, nations agreed on the need to limit warming to two degrees and ideally 1.5 above pre-industrial levels, come up with their own action plans to achieve this, and review them five years later.

Five COPs later, and this year’s talks will formally review these plans. As the host nation, the UK is hoping to see targets ratcheted up this time out.

A UN report last week found current plans put the world on a trajectory for 2.7 degrees of warming by the end of this century, though net-zero pledges might shave a little off that.

After the opening ceremony, leaders will then take their turn to deliver national statements to tout their climate plans, possibly ramp up targets, or set out expectations and demands for the talks. These statements will continue into Tuesday for the second and final day of the World Leaders Summit section of the conference.

Developing nations want rich countries to fulfill a long-overdue promise to stump up $100bn a year in climate finance to help them cut emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change, for which developed countries are mostly responsible.

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Over the next two weeks, delegates will seek to hammer out deals on “coal, cars, cash and trees”, as Boris Johnson likes to put it.

These roughly translate to phasing out coal, accelerating the transition to electric vehicles and ending deforestation, as well as stumping up climate finance to help developing nations on the front line of the climate crisis.

The heads of key major economies, including China’s Xi Jinping and Russian president Vladimir Putin, are not attending, though they are sending delegations.

COP26 President Alok Sharma has described the summit as the “last, best hope” for tackling climate change.

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