There’s no shortage of cynicism when it comes to fixing climate change (or even admitting it’s a problem), so perhaps it’s no surprise that leaders are making little progress this week at the UN Climate Change Conference.

This year’s meeting in Durban, South Africa, marks the 17th round of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change discussions about what can be done to slow global warming. The work to be done this year includes a laundry list of items, but chief among them is hashing out the fate of the tattered 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Unlike the parent Framework Convention, the Protocol actually sets binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

But many consider the Kyoto Protocol a failure because emissions have risen more than 25 percent since it was ratified. Of the increase, 58 percent is attributable to developing nations that aren't bound by the agreement, including a whopping 23 percent from China, according to The Economist. The United States, which opted out of participating, is close behind at 20 percent.

The Kyoto Protocol is set to expire in 2012, and leaders will need to decide whether to extend it or replace it with some other agreement. On one side of the fence sit poor and developing countries, which are more vulnerable to drought, extreme storms, and other climate change impacts. They, along with the European Union, would like to see a binding extension of Kyoto until 2015, according to the Guardian. On the other side are the big polluters—the United States, China, and India—and nations unhappy with their participation in Kyoto, such as Canada, Russia, and Japan. They propose not even beginning new negotiations until 2015 and possibly not implementing changes until 2020. Climate experts say that’s too late.

“I feel we are losing completely the scientific rationale for action,” Rajendra Pachauri, director of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in an e-mail to the New York Times. The increased frequency of extreme climate-change-related events "indicate[s] that inaction in dealing with climate change and delays would only expose human society and all living species to risk that could become serious.”

Council on Foreign Relations Fellow Michael Levi agrees politics are overshadowing the dire consequences of not limiting emissions. He said insistence on a legally binding agreement is probably what's holding up the game.

“A legally binding agreement that requires ambitious efforts from all can reassure nations that their individual contributions will matter. It thus makes sense to seek a binding treaty for everyone,” Levi writes in the Financial Times. “But this logic is flawed. Countries enter binding international agreements with an eye to ensuring that they will be able to comply with their commitments. The legally binding nature of an international deal can thus deter national ambition in the first place.”

Binding or not, there are those that say the Kyoto Protocol's fight to keep global warming from reaching 2° Celsius—a level considered dangerous and irreversible—is already lost.

“There is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global mean surface temperature at below 2°C, despite repeated high-level statements to the contrary,” Rolling Stone quotes a report by UK climatologists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows as stating. “Moreover, the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between dangerous and extremely dangerous climate change.

If that outlook isn't bleak enough, we're probably accelerating toward the 2°C increase, according to the International Energy Agency. A report released by the IEA in early November states that fossil fuel infrastructure built in the next five years will essentially seal our climate fate. (A review of the report can be found in the Guardian).

Aside from tilting at the windmill of global emissions reduction, there is other work being done in Durban this week, including “relatively small and, to many, arcane questions of process and finance,” according to the New York Times. Most notably, world leaders will be creating the structure for a $1 billion Global Climate Change Fund outlined at last year’s Cancún Conference. The fund would help poor countries address climate change. Thought to be one of the less thorny issues, even those discussions are falling apart.

Sadly, the Durban talks seem to be propagating the feeling that no matter what is done, it will be too little, too late, and too disproportionate. Instead of a convergence of concerned leaders, we’re left with what an Economist editorial has termed a climate-change circus.

“What the world is seeing, though, is scarcely any action at all,” the editorial states. “Emissions are rising faster than ever. Some politicians, wrongly, think the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming is too shaky. Others, especially in straitened times, are reluctant to spend money on a distant and uncertain threat—especially when their peers are doing nothing.

“All these faults are on display at the UN’s annual climate-change circus, running in Durban until December 9th.”