It would be reassuring to know dilemmas of global proportions can always count on getting a degree of world attention, but as some 200 leaders assemble today for the climate change conference in Durban, most eyes seem averted from the life-and-death issues up for debate.The US public is preoccupied with forthcoming elections and america's relative decline in the world while Europe is gripped by the euro-zone crisis. Fears of economic meltdown trump concerns about melting ice caps - though the former are surely easier to fix than the latter.  But the stakes in Durban are higher than ever as countries wrestle over ways to halt rising temperatures and, specifically, over renewal of the 1997 Kyoto protocol - a sub-treaty of the 1992 UN framework treaty agreed in Rio - which all countries signed but which only impacted on the old industrialised West and Japan.  Kyoto bound what were then the world's major polluters to cut carbon emissions by 2008-12, working on a baseline of emissions in 1990. at the time, there wasn't much argument about which countries would have to do most to cut emissions. The US was then the world's biggest polluter, producing 25 per cent of C02.  The problem is that since 1997 the world economy has been transformed. In the 1990s China was industrialising fast but few grasped the scale of its coming explosion in economic activity. China's role as a polluter has expanded accordingly. From 1996 to 2007 its carbon emissions doubled and in 2007 it took over from the US as the world's largest polluter. China now is responsible for 24 per cent of C02 emissions while the US is "only" responsible for 16 per cent.  This shift leaves the Kyoto provisions looking out of sync with the new economic reality, as Kyoto did not oblige China or India to do anything to cut emissions, while giving Ja