That is not a tragedy. It is more like a success. One of the fortnight’s achievements is to have drawn attention to the difficulty of enforcing the Kyoto Protocol itself, never mind drafting a successor, given that so many countries are on course to breach it by an extravagant margin.

It has also been useful to have spent time discussing other, less restrictive kinds of regional treaty and industrial targets which might be tolerable to the United States, India, China and Brazil.

The pity is that this may be drowned out by the storm of righteous accusations directed, inevitably, at the US above all.

This meeting is one of a series on the threat of climate change that stretches back nearly 20 years. Their most solid achievements have been a 1992 framework convention on voluntary cuts in greenhouse gases and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, setting binding targets.

The protocol, ratified by 156 countries, came into force only in February this year. Its most ambitious clauses set binding targets for 39 industrialised countries; the only significant ones that have not signed up are the US and Australia. It sets them individual targets for cutting emissions by the period 2008 to 2012, compared with levels in 1990.

There has been more of a sense of urgency at this year’s conference, attended by about 10,000 delegates, as there appeared to be more evidence of climate change caused by human activity.

For Britain, to judge from the ranks of newspaper headlines, this was driven home by the report that the Gulf Stream had weakened, and that this might be because of global warming. There was a comic sense of shocked intimacy and hyperbole in the reporting: the speculation that this might mean us, quite soon, turning as cold as Canada.

That is the essence of these alarms: every country would be hit differently by the phenomenon, and it can imagine, at the most extreme, the annihilation of ordinary life. Bangladesh fears that it would see its land gradually lost to the sea. The Inuit (as they spent much time telling the conference) would see their ice floes shrink.

For that reason — and because of countries’ very different economic structures — you might think that the conference would have dropped the idea that, in environmental treaties, "one size fits all".

But it didn’t. If there is a single reason why the fortnight has passed with so little solid result, it is because of the obsession among Kyoto signatories with trying to forge another global pact — and with berating those who won’t join.

They might do better to work out what to do about Kyoto itself, given how many countries are way off course. Spain’s emissions in 2003 were up by nearly 42 per cent on 1990 levels; Portugal’s by 37 per cent; and Greece’s and Ireland’s by 26 per cent.

Canada, whose Prime Minister, Paul Martin, made a rare attack on the US for failing to share "the global conscience", has increased its emissions by more than 24 per cent in that period. Emissions in the US were up by only 13 per cent in that time.

Under the Kyoto rules, if signatories overshoot, they will have to make both the promised cuts and 30 per cent more in a second period from 2013. But this, as it stands, is a sanction so undefined as to be meaningless.

That is what signatories should be concentrating on if they value their treaty as much as they say. Beyond that, they need to look at ways of bringing the US, India, China and Brazil into some kind of treaty — given that each of them is loath to accept binding targets.

The US, which has not made the best of its position (it could have argued that doubled oil prices are on their own prompting more efficiency), has suggested looking at technology transfer.

That would reward countries inventing more efficient technology, and for sharing it with developing countries.

Others have suggested emissions standards for "dirty" industries, or intensity targets — comparing emissions to the level of economic activity (something the US also likes).

These are not pointless suggestions. They are probably the only realistic way forward.

In the meantime, it is ridiculous for countries to berate the US for failing to join a treaty they may find virtually impossible to observe themselves.

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