Thunberg may be the world’s most famous climate activist — but that doesn’t mean she has universal celebrity status at the world’s biggest summit on global warming.

The 23-year-old stood in a long security line at COP31 late in the afternoon on Monday, the start of annual United Nations climate talks held this year in Antalya, Turkey. A few people recognized the founder of Fridays for the Future, a youth protest movement she began in Stockholm and that inspired legions of activists. Some quietly requested photos. Yet delegates from Libya and Somalia standing behind Thunberg didn’t know anything about her, or the activism she began as a teenager.

Thunberg’s participation in this year’s climate summit — her first appearance since the 2021 talks in Glasgow, Scotland — hasn’t been widely publicized, and she described herself as skeptical of the proceedings. “We’ve had 31 COPs now, and we’re still speeding in the wrong direction,” she said in an interview in the lengthy queue for credentials that allow access to the UN-controlled blue zone, where negotiations will take place over the next two weeks.

She’s often upbraided diplomats and world leaders for their lack of urgency, including an incendiary 2019 speech at UN headquarters that laid the blame on adult inaction on global warming for “stealing her childhood.”She still sees the political and business leaders who turn out for climate talks as primarily engaged in greenwashing — and expressed concern over the Turkish host government’s record on human rights.

“As long as we don’t focus on the real crisis, we are losing time,” she said Monday. “And that means more lives we’ll never have back.”At past climate summits, Thunberg has attracted attention for her efforts to travel in ways that minimize greenhouse gas emissions — which means avoiding airplanes. To reach Antalya by Nov. 9, she left London on Nov. 3 on a journey of “trains, buses and sleep deprivation,” she said.

Her concern for the inadequacy of the COP process hasn’t changed over the years. In fact, it’s even become a widespread view among those who participate the talks. But there are new issues this year that haven’t been a major part of the mix at prior COPs, most notably the spread of artificial intelligence and the backlash against data centers. Did she worry that youth activists who may have once been inspired to join her climate movement would instead be focused on data centers?

“They’re both the same issue,” Thunberg said, noting both the environmental toll of data centers as well as the way they overshadow more fundamental needs. “We’re detaching ourselves from our human values.”