I've just returned from hosting two weeks of conversations, workshops and interviews at COP30 in Belém with TED Countdown. Much has been written about this COP's shortfalls, frustrations and achievements — for excellent analysis, try Carbon Brief or Outrage and Optimism's Inside COP podcast series. Instead, I want to share a few personal reflections about where we actually are — and what comes next.

There’s a quiet in the eye of the storm of the new Trump administration, as people figure out what to do in a landscape where logic is turned on its head. 

When astrophysicist Carl Sagan first saw images of our solar system taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 he described the Earth as appearing like “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”