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Did it stir something in the memory, by any chance, the extraordinary heat of a fortnight ago, when Britain met with its hottest-ever October day, and numerous places experienced their hottest day of the whole year? Did the sheer, seasonal abnormality of its glare give pause, and revive a concern which has faded almost completely, in the face of skepticism and the economic crisis – the concern that the climate might be drastically changing, with potentially deadly consequences?

If so, I suspect that the revival was brief, and that most people have gone back to worrying about their jobs. Global warming is an issue which has dropped off the pubic agenda almost completely. Yet in less than eight weeks’ time it will dominate the headlines once again, when, at the UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa, the gaping split in the world community over how to tackle climate change will come to a crunch.

The essence of this split is simple; developing countries (like India, say) think the rich, developed countries should do it; the rich developed countries (like us) think that everyone should do it. The first position was enshrined in the current climate treaty, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which the rich world agreed to cut its carbon emissions, while the developing countries were obliged to do nothing; and now Kyoto, which in its present version runs out on 31 December 2012, is up for renewal.