Two predictions for 2008: North Africa will become the most important front in the war on terror. And world leaders, including America’s presidential candidates, will be more concerned about changing weather patterns than terrorism.

Such choices can quickly become real: When the largest attack yet against a U.N. installation occurred last week in Algiers, Secretary General Ban was in Bali along with world leaders including Mayor Bloomberg, attending a U.N.-sponsored conference on climate-changing gas emissions.

Do you rush over to Algeria, where Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists just hit the U.N. installation, leaving 18 employees of the organization dead — surpassing the number of U.N. staffers among the 22 persons killed in Baghdad in 2003? Or do you stay at the Indonesian resort island, where attendees have just arrived by private jets, commercial flights, or, like Mr. Ban, traveling on chartered planes donated by oil-producing Gulf States?

Mr. Ban issued several statements of shock and sadness over the Algiers bombing, and then sent the U.N. Development Program’s administrator, Kemal Dervis, and the organization’s security chief, David Veness, to be at the bombing’s site.

He chose to stay at Bali because delegates there had just hit a snag. Culminating with a chorus of boos for America’s delegation, there was major acrimony in negotiating a resolution that would reach an agreement over the creation, within two years, of a new treaty that, if signed and ratified, would call for gas emissions to be reduced — although with no reasonable enforcement means.

Mr. Bloomberg has professed to be much concerned by the effects of climate change, but can you imagine him staying at Bali for this kind of gobbledegook for even one second had the terror attack occurred in New York, rather than at a U.N. installation in North Africa? Any sensible politician would have immediately rushed off to the site of the attack, rallying troops and a constituency that had just been hit by a vicious enemy. No cause, no matter how noble, comes even close to attending to the people you lead at a time of crisis.

Mr. Ban’s decision looks even worse upon examination of his original itinerary: After a quick stop at East Timor, his plan was to fly from Bali to New York last night on a chartered jumbo jet, paid for by the United Arab Emirates, for a quick stop to attend a $1,000 a seat concert to benefit South Korea’s Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, before hopping the jet to Paris to attend today’s conference of donors to the Palestinian Authority. Only after the London Times’s correspondent, James Bone, published a calculation last week that the New York hop over would have added 4,300 miles to Mr. Ban’s itinerary — generating about 1,684 pounds extra of CO2 emissions for each member of his delegation — did Mr. Ban decide to forgo the Manhattan fund-raiser.

Like everyone else not in the oil business, I certainly hope that 2008 will be the watershed moment in which a scientific breakthrough will end our dependence on fossil fuels. Such new technology will reduce the power of terrorists’ sponsors, and may even reverse climate patterns predicted to be catastrophic. But if instead of new technologies we concentrate on steps that would significantly slow down the world’s top economies, the net result may be more hazardous than beneficial.

World leaders also find it hard to walk and chew gum at the same time. Concentrating all our attentions on averting a crisis that by all calculation will not start affecting us for a few decades yet — time enough for technology and science to find more adequate solutions than unenforceable and costly international treaties — we may overlook more immediate threats. Is it worth it, as means to reduce carbon pollution, to distribute wholesale clean-energy nuclear materials and knowhow to terror-sponsoring countries, such as Iran, risking an atomic Holocaust?

Meanwhile, just because we turn our attentions to post-September 11 issues, global terrorism has not gone away. It might be in remission in Iraq and Afghanistan, where America’s military efforts are mostly concentrated. But as last week’s attack on the U.N. outpost amply demonstrated, the Maghreb arm of al Qaeda is a growing threat to the governments of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. The largest prize is Egypt, the Arab world’s most important power center, where Islamists stand to gain ground if problems in President Mubarak’s succession create a political vacuum.

Mr. Ban’s instincts are normally sound, and his priorities are much closer to those of America than any of his immediate predecessors. Will he rethink this one? Will America?

bavni@nysun.com