IT'S now just 99 days until the start of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.

Against a backdrop of catastrophic extreme weather on five continents, the stakes could not be any higher.

In Siberia, 320,000 people have been ordered to stay indoors to avoid choking on fumes from forest wildfires. Floods in Europe have claimed at least 200 lives. Henan province in China saw eight inches of rain falling in just one hour. Experts fear record-shattering temperatures across North America have killed more than a billion sea creatures.

Where the last COP summit ended in disappointment, the cost of failure this time will be devastation.

A Glasgow climate agreement must deliver action, in the here and now, not just more distant targets. But unbelievably the UK Government could still approve a brand new oil field off the coast of Shetland, just weeks before COP, risking any credibility it claims as host of the talks.

The Cambo field could produce 800 million barrels of oil, and it’s just one of many new projects that the UK fossil fuel industry wants in the coming years. But their desperate arguments are now being shredded by experts at the highest level.

Dr Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said this week it was “absolutely clear” that “all new drilling must stop if we are to meet climate goals” and that the oil and gas reserves we already have “are more than enough to meet demand.”

He went on to say that this is a fundamental test: “Are we serious about meeting our goals, or is it just lip service?”

The pressure on the UK Government to reject Cambo, and others like it, will surely grow - but questions of credibility lie closer to home too.

The Scottish Government notably declined to oppose Cambo this week, instead parroting the oil and gas lobbyists’ line about the sector playing “a positive role” in transition.

Here in Glasgow, the Strathclyde Pension Fund continues to invest more than £500 million of workers’ hard-earned money in fossil fuel giants. That includes an estimated £71 million tied up in Royal Dutch Shell, the firm behind Cambo, which was recently ordered in court to cut its emissions by 45%.

Scottish Greens councillors, working alongside divestment campaigners, have created a historic opportunity which could see these investments dropped, in September, before the COP summit starts - but only if the fund agrees to minimum environmental standards that are based in climate science, not industry greenwash.

We’ve said that the starting point must be to drop all firms still bidding for new oil, gas and coal reserves, anywhere on the planet. Instead we should be switching those funds to drive a green jobs recovery, here in the Glasgow region. In the most recent council meeting, council leader Susan Aitken said she personally backed our calls, but that it wasn’t in her power to demand them of the fund’s managers.

So it's on all of us, collectively, over the next 99 days and beyond, to make all levels of government, from Westminster to George Square, face a climate credibility test. They must know it is what they do, not what they say, that matters now.