From the outside—and sometimes from the inside also—annual U.N. climate conferences known as COPs can seem like a bunch of aimless talk. For more than three decades, the U.N. has held these conferences, and the world is still on track for catastrophic warming. And so as 20,000 people, including around 120 world leaders, gather in Glasgow this year for COP26, I thought I would answer a very simple question: why does COP matter?

The simple answer—as anyone following climate news likely knows—is that the world has warmed around 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution, and we’re dangerously close to passing the 1.5°C threshold that scientists have warned will bring dire consequences. Because carbon stays in the atmosphere for decades, we need a dram…