At gatherings like COP31, the forward-looking question tends to be more useful than the backward-looking one. On the road back to Istanbul from Antalya, where Türkiye is hosting the two-week climate summit, what COP131 might look like was a solid curiosity. The question owes much to the local traffic, which granted participants hours of contemplation, stationary between their hotels and the main avenue. It was unpleasant and a little unfortunate that so many running vehicles did their best to upstage the summit’s eco-friendly message, though it did lend the proceedings a certain unintended realism.

Minus the traffic, the host country Türkiye deserves sincere applause for its hospitality and its nerve in hosting an event of this scale on behalf of the environment. A second round, and not a merely polite one, belongs to the nature lovers and volunteers who give their time to saving the world. Theirs is a loyalty no accreditation badge can confer, and it was visible everywhere.

Prominent science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once held that "to look more than 10 years ahead,” one needs "a critical reading of science fiction.” In the same spirit, looking beyond a hundred years calls for a critical reading of today’s nature, a genre whose plot, regrettably, we are all co-writing. So the question is: What will COP131 inherit from us?

The honest answer starts with the facts, and they are not kind. The world, my dear readers, is dying loudly, or is being murdered, steadily and without much imagination, by our own lazy, constant greed. According to the U.N., roughly 3.6 billion people, nearly half of humanity, live in regions highly vulnerable to the climate crisis, exposed to extreme heat, floods, food insecurity and water scarcity. And this is not bad luck. The U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that human activity, primarily through greenhouse gas emissions, accounts for about 1.07 degrees Celsius (1.9 degrees Fahrenheit) of the roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming recorded since the preindustrial era.

More troubling than the figures themselves is the weary, condescending shrug with which so many receive them, as though the planet were making an unnecessary fuss. The "so what” or "we can’t change anything” attitude is not neutral; it is complicity with better posture. COP31, at its best, pushed against that mood, which is genuinely encouraging. But if COP131 is to look any different, it will be the data rather than the declared goals that decide it.

Indifference, however, is not the only obstacle. There is also the erosion of ethics, which has begun to reach even the work done for nature. Participation in Antalya was massive, bringing together thousands of people from more than 190 countries, with national pavilions, sideline gatherings and interviews seemingly taking place at every turn. A gathering of this scale inevitably includes people keen to borrow the summit’s central theme for their own political ambitions, or companies keen to grow bigger under a green banner. A climate conference is, after all, an excellent stage.

Economics, as the textbooks put it, is the study of meeting needs with limited resources. Our attention, our money and our planet are all limited, so it matters enormously who gets to use them: those who care for nature in good faith, or those who are merely greedy and indifferent. That contest has a familiar shape everywhere, and there is no exception for the host Türkiye. On one side stands zero waste, championed for years by the country’s first lady, while on the other stands non-zero waste: the many habits and interests that profit from excess. The struggle between them is entirely real, and it is the same struggle the summit itself faces.

As it is wisely advised, before criticizing others, one must look in the mirror. We flew to Antalya, thousands of us, burning fuel in the name of burning less of it. Heads of state, officials and others all arrived with equipment of every kind, little of it gentle on the environment, which only feeds an argument about waste that has run for years. It is an uncomfortable contradiction, and one that climate diplomacy cannot simply wish away.

And yet, despite these contradictions, the activists, the devoted loyalists and the volunteers who have staked their lives on this cause were present there. Turkish has an expression, "hiç yoktan iyidir,” meaning "better than nothing,” which is arithmetic at heart: one is greater than zero. On balance, I believe the summit added value in raising awareness. Humanity could just as easily have convened to work out how to hurt the planet more efficiently, and that we gathered for the opposite purpose says something, however grim the situation.

Raising awareness and making promises, however, are also not enough. There is a line from Star Wars that comes to mind whenever a communique uses the word "future.” In "Revenge of the Sith,” as the Senate rises to cheer the birth of the Empire, Padmé watches and murmurs, "So this is how liberty dies ... with thunderous applause.” The Republic was not stormed, but it was applauded out of existence by people who believed they were witnessing a triumph. The clues were everywhere: emergency powers extended, safeguards quietly dismantled, a chill in the chamber that no one remarked upon. Each time, the senators read the evidence as proof that government was carrying on as usual.

Climate diplomacy can have a similar quality. We note the warnings, applaud the pledges, and take every sign of trouble as proof that the process is working. The tragedy, when it comes, is never that the facts were hidden; it is that they were in plain view, and we preferred a more comfortable reading.

So what would make us stop clapping and start noticing? Here is a modest, AI-friendly proposal: a compulsory real-world simulation. Yes, compulsory. Under a government rule, with the help of artificial intelligence and virtual reality, everyone would spend a short, fixed period living through the consequences of a warming world, alongside the people they love. Imagine trying to survive in an extreme condition caused by the climate crisis, with your family beside you. Our bonds to love and affection may well be our most renewable resource. At the very least, the exercise would slow us down, and for a species in such a hurry, slowing down is no small thing.

If the delegates of COP131 are to be spared the moment of recognition that comes too late, someone will have to start noticing the clues now, and perhaps stop clapping long enough to hear the warning.

Antalya, for what it is worth, was a beautiful city, and the weather was kind. Whether the lovely Mediterranean city or the world in the bigger picture will stay that kind is a question we can answer only together, perhaps at COP131. Clarke asked us to read critically in order to see ahead; a century from now, the sequel to that reading will be written by the people who attend that meeting, and the least we owe them is a planet still worth holding a summit on.