Marking time at the COP30 climate summit

Populist parties are already in power in some developed countries and waiting just outside the door in many more. The key trick of populist politicians is to tell the voters what they want to hear, and the voters definitely do not want their lives to be disrupted by global heating, so they are told it is not happening. It's "the world's biggest con", in Donald Trump's words.

- Gwynne Dyer

These lies have consequences. On the eve of COP30, the annual climate summit that opened in Brazil on Monday, only one-third of the countries that signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (64 out of 198) had submitted their plans for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

Every member is supposed to improve their "Nationally Determined Contributions" to cutting emissions every five years, and new NDCs are due this year, but they are being ignored by most countries this time around. Money is tight, wars are a huge distraction, and climate has become unfashionable, so we'll just have to wait and hope for better times. That could be a plausible, even a sensible strategy if we were still in the nineties or the noughties, when climate change was still seen as a slow, linear, and above all, predictable process. But we now know that like most natural processes, climate change usually happens in sudden lurches: you cross an invisible threshold, and suddenly you are in a changed world.