It’s that time of year again, and the usual suspects are gathering for the 31st Conference of the Parties (COP 31) in the Turkish city of Antalya. Almost every country except the United States has a delegation there and there will be a great deal of talk about the changing climate, but not much will be done about it.

This is more or less by design. If you wanted to create an organisation that really does things, you would not make membership open to every country and give every member a veto. Yet COP 31, like all the COPs before it, includes many countries that depend on fossil fuels for domestic energy, export income, or both.

The countries that openly accept the blame for blocking a consensus are usually those for whom oil and gas revenues are absolutely indispensable – places like Saudi Arabia and Russia – but a great many other countries tacitly support their blocking tactics. That is why it took 29 years (until 2023) for a COP to even mention “fossil fuels” in its final report.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the climate train has jumped the tracks. The careful calculations that enabled climate scientists to plot out futures where the warming might be stopped at an average global temperature two degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial (+2°) by the 2040s have been cancelled. We could be at +2° and climbing by 2030, four years from now.

The basic flaw in the thinking was to assume that global warming would continue to be linear. It actually was pretty close to linear in the early years of climate science, climbing just one-tenth of a degree C every five years. But then it jumped three-tenths of a degree in a single year (2023) and it is now climbing steadily at twice the previous long-term rate.

In other words, our climate appears to have gone non-linear, which means highly unpredictable. But we shouldn’t be surprised: other climate scientists have been working away at what happened the last time we had a big shift in the climate, and it was a non-stop roller-coaster ride.

The overall pattern was not news. The world has been having prolonged glacial periods punctuated by shorter warm periods for the past two million years. During the past million years it has been around 100,000 years of hard freeze followed by 10,000 years of warm ‘interglacial’ weather, rinse and repeat ad nauseam.

But more recently they worked out the fine detail of what happened during the last Great Thaw, and it was chaotic. The warming began around 14,500 years ago, with ice sheets melting and forests spreading, but then a sudden cold snap hit around 12,800 years ago and plunged much of the planet back into freezing conditions for more than a thousand years.

They reckon what drove that switch was changes in the North Atlantic Current, also known as the Gulf Stream (which the oceanographers are also worried about right now). But around 11,700 years ago it suddenly warmed up again, and the human race has spent all the time since then in the warmth of the glorious Holocene period.

My ancestors and yours lived through all that upheaval (and many of them doubtless died because of it). We do not want our descendants to have to live through different but equally abrupt and radical changes, but the way our current climate is jumping around suggests that similar upheavals could be on the way.

That is the unspoken reason why some climate scientists, while continuing to hope for progress at COP31, are also turning to alternative ‘groups of the willing’: countries that are ready to take more ambitious actions now. Around sixty of them met in Colombia last April to draw up national roadmaps and coordinate fast fixes.

Nobody there actually knew where the threshold is in terms of unleashing climate chaos. The best they could do was to slow down the warming as much as possible by concentrating on relatively cheap and easy wins like cutting methane emissions, HFCs, nitrous oxide, black carbon (soot), and ground-level ozone.

Yes, of course carbon dioxide is the biggest long-term problem, because it hangs around and accumulates for centuries. But even a minority of countries concentrating on the quick fixes might mean we never get dragged across that threshold of chaos, so it’s a gamble worth taking.

Of course, nobody will admit publicly that this is what they are doing and why. Too much information just confuses the audience.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers’. The previous book, ‘The Shortest History of War’, is also still available.