New Delhi, Dec. 17 -- And so, another year of the Anthropocene is about to end. Goodbye 2025, you will not be missed. You will be remembered, if at all, as yet another year of let downs and betrayals by all the world leaders that promised to protect the planet from deadly climate change. You will be remembered as the year when the polycrisis of extreme inequality, erosion of democratic freedoms, a greed for other people's resources, genocidal wars, outright racism and degrading natural ecosystems visibly converged with the climate crisis. 2025 cannot end soon enough.

I started writing my Climate Change Tracker column in mid-2019. Over the past six and a half years, I must have written hundreds of these missives. They have, in a way, been...