COP 26: Will we hear the alarm call on climate change or press snooze?

They have been out on the streets drawing attention to climate change, to unethical investments to hypocrisy and greed, while others are forced to suffer as a result.

What a bunch of self-serving egomaniacs, eh?

Earlier this week Barack Obama delivered a speech to the COP 26 in Glasgow.

READ MORE: Climate activists rally outside the COP26 Blue Zone in Glasgow

As well as urging governments, including his own, led by his Vice-President of eight years, Joe Biden, to act on climate change now, he had a word or two for the protesters.

He said that blocking traffic and disrupting people’s lives was maybe not the best way to win the argument on climate change.

Sometimes a bit of civil disobedience is needed. I’m sure there were people telling Rosa Parks she shouldn’t break the law by sitting on a bus the law said she couldn’t.

Had Barack Obama been around then, I think I know what he would tell those people.

The word from the police and politicians before the COP 26 started seemed to be that protest will be allowed and facilitated as long as it is peaceful and not disruptive.

People could protest, it seemed, as long as it didn’t disrupt the proceedings of the COP event and only in line with the terms laid down by the police and Government.

READ MORE: COP 26 climate Justice March: The day the world came to Glasgow

What’s the point of protest if you don’t get noticed?

We have seen many types of protest in the last two weeks in Glasgow.

From the traditional big march on the streets, the artistic and theatrical, the big visual statement to the wacky and the disruptive.

The big marches last weekend, on the Friday and Saturday saw tens of thousands on the streets of Glasgow.

An estimated 100,000 joined in on Saturday for the climate justice march. They came from all over the world to make their point.

Others took action without prior notice.

The reaction to the more direct protest has been they are a nuisance. Protesters glued themselves to the wall and pavement outside a big energy provider. There were branded idiots and vandals.

Others chained themselves together and sat in a rubber dinghy blocking the road outside a big bank. They were told to get job.

A meeting of business leaders was targeted with a road in Maryhill blocked by activists. People said they should have been dragged away.

The authorities wanted to manage the protests. This in merely a challenge issued to the protesters.

If a protest doesn’t attract attention or make anyone think about the issue then it has not worked.

Many protests and speeches were about galvanizing the people to put pressure on their leaders to act.

But the fact COP 26 in in Glasgow should be an opportunity for everyone to have a look at what they are doing.

At a rally outside the COP venue yesterday on the last day a woman from Brazil spoke and she made probably the most to the point speech I had heard in the two weeks either inside or outside the COP.

Her name was Renee, I think, as it was difficult to make out in the wind and rain. but her message was clear.

She said: “The ecology crisis is a racial crisis.”

Speaking to the many white, Scottish, British and European protesters who were on her side, she laid it out in stark terms.

She said: “Your standard of living comes with a cost. We in the south don’t have this standard. They (the leaders in the south) think they can create it for us by more pollution.

"They are killing us, the black and brown people in the south. We are suffering in the south because of your high standards of living. Even our leaders are white people from the elites.

“We need you to recognise your privileges.”

If the COP 26 passed and no-one had their life disrupted, no one was made to feel uncomfortable about the comforts most of us enjoy, largely on the backs of discomfort, pain and loss of other people on the other side of the world, then what would change.

There was some disappointment that the COP had not led to a big boost for hospitality businesses. Bars and restaurants had hoped for a much needed boost and who could blame them after the last 18 months.

Many of the people who came to Glasgow, did not come for a holiday, or to enjoy what the city had to offer after the working day was done.

Some came with nowhere to stay, with no money to spend, to show us that the lives we lead in the west and the north is killing people in the south.

Either in the rush to extract more resources that are leading to climate change we are responsible for the destruction of their lands or the worst effects of climate change in the shape of floods, famine and fire is killing their people.

It looks like COP 26 in Glasgow should have been a wake up call for all of us in the richer, developed countries.

If we do nothing and refuse to listen to those who came here to tell us, we will simply have pressed the snooze button to shut them up.