Hello and welcome to NewsHour. It's coming to you live from the BBC World Service studios in central London. I'm Tim Franks.

Sometimes the truth is that news may not feel that new, or to put it another way, not that surprising.

And yet, you could make an argument that nothing right now may ultimately

be more important than this year's UN climate talks. They've just got underway in Baku,

the capital of Azerbaijan. So a long-sheduled summit has begun, maybe non-surprise number one.

Non-surprise number two is that the figures around the climate

are alarming. The UN has today warned that this year will be the hottest on record. And I guess

the non-shocks keep coming when you've got the person chairing the talk saying it's a critical

moment for the world's climate goals.

We may feel we've heard it all before, but does that mean that the sense of urgency and the

sense of expectation should be any less? We'll try and assess the mood and ambition at the summit

in a moment. First, the president of COP 29, as these talks are called, Muktau Babaev, opened the proceedings with this call.

COP29 is a moment of truth for the Paris Agreement.

It will test our commitment to the multilateral climate system.

We must now demonstrate that we are prepared to meet the goals we have set ourselves.

This is not easy.

And as for the alarming statistics,

Co. Barrett, the Deputy Secretary General of the UN's World Meteorological Organization,

had this to say to NewsHour.

I don't think we can declare failure at this point, but the trend is not good.

You really need to measure these temperatures across decades, not just for a given year,

but the trend is pretty significant, and the period from 2015 to 2024 will be the warmest

...