In 1988, Time magazine selected “The Endangered Earth” as its person of the year. This December, 31 years later, the honour went to Greta Thunberg. The point of the Time exercise is to take a complex issue and locate a person through whom we can better understand it. Twenty years ago the magazine’s search for a human environmental story stalled in orbit; now it is easy to locate.

That wouldn’t have been possible even this time last year. The biggest story in climate in 2019 is the way in which, after years of languishing outside the mainstream, climate activism has finally broken through. It seems obvious in retrospect that the kids were the key. Self-organised, serious, heartbreakingly frank about their anger at seeing their futures foreclosed by politicians who won’t even live to see the consequences, they have lent a powerful moral drive to the entire movement.

Climate protests are not new, but they acquired a new urgency this year. Extinction Rebellion looks a lot like green groups of years past, but where those earlier protests were perhaps too polite, ER has enthusiastically embraced disruption. Like the school protesters, it has been emboldened by what now seem to be the obvious immediate effects of the climate crisis: deadly heatwaves across Europe, wildfires in the US, cyclones in the Pacific and record-breaking high temperatures across the world. For several years scientists have been speaking in more concrete terms about the consequences of climate change, and have been willing to connect it directly to current events. The link between the climate emergency and our own lives has never seemed clearer. Finally, after decades of activists struggling to push the crisis into the larger consciousness, poll after poll shows that public concern, and desire for action, is at an all-time high.

It’s a depressing story because it’s effectively the same news we’ve heard nearly every year since the conference began

The question that became clearer as the year went on was, having achieved what the climate movement always wanted – prominent and positive media coverage, widespread public support, audiences with world leaders – was it possible to effect any actual political change? The spectacle of Thunberg and the larger youth climate movement arriving at international meetings and parliaments and accusing heads of state of hypocrisy to their faces is undoubtedly thrilling. But climate politics itself still seems far from any genuine watershed moment.

There has been little concrete progress. What the protests have sparked, instead, is a rush by governments to declare a “climate emergency” and to set or retrench future emissions targets. In previous years this alone would have seemed radical enough, generating enormous goodwill; now, however, the gap between words and actions has widened too far, and credulity is in short supply. The climate researcher Rebecca Willis put the new standard succinctly earlier this month: “Targets don’t reduce carbon. Policies do.”

There has been some hope on that front. Parties in the UK and candidates in the US Democratic primaries took on comprehensive climate platforms for the first time. These either directly or indirectly reference the concept of a “green new deal” – pairing increased spending on climate with a larger social transformation, and breaking down the wall that separates climate policy from the rest of national politics. But crucially, nothing similar has been brought forward by a government actually in power.

What hasn’t changed is the intractable nature of international climate negotiations. The UN’s climate change conference, COP, falls at the end of the calendar year, and, being the place where countries affirm their climate commitments under the UN framework convention on climate change, rarely produces a hopeful coda to the previous 12 months. “Good” COPs are rare. This year’s iteration in Madrid wasn’t the worst, but it seemed strangely removed from the rest of the year’s events, as if the delegates had been bussed directly across space and time from last December’s meeting in Katowice, bypassing entirely the wave of protest and the titanic shift in public opinion.

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And so, in the same week that Time honoured the climate movement, a loose coalition of rightwing governments – including administrations in Brazil and Australia – effectively stymied the conference’s goal of strengthening the Paris agreement. Despite warnings that current plans are totally inadequate, and 11,000 researchers stating “the climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected”, little was agreed, and hope for action was – again – punted to next year.

It’s a depressing story, and it isn’t the biggest climate story of the year because it’s effectively the same news we’ve heard nearly every year since the conference began a quarter of a century ago. The rise of a broadly popular climate movement and the stirrings of national-level climate politics puts the continued failure of the negotiations into stark relief. The international effort was always meant to lead the way, but it feels increasingly remote from the rest of the climate struggle – as if it’s taking place on a different planet.

• Stephen Buranyi is a writer specialising in science and the environment