As hot tempers and disappointment boil off the Copenhagen climate accord, a cooler-headed consensus is emerging.

No, not the consensus that most participants wanted to see after two weeks of UN talks — not the one in which nearly 200 nations would have bound each other to limit greenhouse gases enough to keep global temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees this century.

The odds of that kumbaya moment were pretty low even before the climate talks began Dec. 7. After all, the UN process requires unanimous consent. And the odds got longer early in the session when nations with wildly differing interests made it clear that they wouldn’t budge from their positions.

The cooler consensus I’m talking about is the dominant view among those who watched the talks closely amid hopes that they would succeed. That consensus can best be summed up as following:

While the talks didn’t make nearly as much progress as was needed, they did represent a big step forward in the response to climate change.

Consensus isn’t the same as unanimity. The most threatened nations rightly remain angry that no agreement was reached to rollback atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to 350 parts per million (they’re in the high 300s right now), and that wealthy nations didn’t agree to send more money their way to deal with rising waters and other calamities. Climate modelers say CO2 levels topping 350 ppm would yield a global temperature hike of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius in this century, which could be enough to flood island nations and many coastal regions in the world’s poorest countries.

The threatened nations were joined in the dismay by many Western environmentalists, most prominent among them the writer Bill McKibben, whose group, 350, has been advocating the lower carbon target for two years. In what has become the most widely quoted expression of disappointment coming out of Copenhagen, McKibben pinned much of the blame on President Obama:

The president blew up the United Nations. The idea that there’s a world community that means something has disappeared tonight. The clear point is, you poor nations can spout off all you want on questions like human rights or the role of women or fighting polio or handling refugees, but when you get too close to the things that count —the fossil fuel that’s at the center of our economy— you can forget about it.

That strikes me as unfair and misdirected. It’s not as if Obama could ignore the domestic American politics of climate without generating a counterproductive reaction; and it’s certainly not as if he alone could have built unanimity in two days on one of the most complex of global issues of our time.

Copenhagen did yield some significant political achievements, and the truth is that Obama was at the center of the four most significant of them:

• Washington seized upon the event to put momentum behind efforts to reduce our own emissions. As the conference opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it intends to regulate greenhouse gases as a pollutant. Then, two bipartisan groups of senators announced plans to push clean energy legislation next year — news that significantly enhanced the prospects of modest climate change legislation by spring.
• The United States backed an international effort to fund mitigation efforts and the transfer of technology to developing lands. Yes, the $100 billion a year that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised the U.S. would help raise is less than poor nations say they need. And there are unanswered questions about where the money will come from and what strings will be attached. But it’s far more realistic amount than what had publicly been offered to the neediest countries until that point.
• The U.S. leveraged its new-found climate credibility to scramble the international politics of climate change in a good way. The process established by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol had exempted China, India and other emerging emitters from the hard greenhouse gas limits faced by wealthier countries. There was a certain justice in that; those countries had a lot less to do do with creating the problem in the first place. But as their economies grow, it’s obvious that the rapidly developing countries can’t continue to increase their emissions. As un-binding and vague as the Copenhagen Accord is, it does establish the principle that those emerging big emitters must be part of the solution.

• And, finally, the overwhelming majority of countries have now agreed to a process that envisions a binding agreement to be signed at next November’s meeting in Mexico. Seeing that the international community wasn’t ready to forge an agreement in Copenhagen, the White House had been pushing even before the conference for such a tiered process. Certainly it would have been nice to get a little further in Copenhagen — to see a bit more umph and urgency behind the accord. All but five of the 193 countries that participated in Copenhagen appear ready to sign the Copenhagen Accord.

The big question coming out of Copenhagen is whether we — meaning all of us — will continue to kick the tough decisions down the road. Climate scientists seem appalled that Copenhagen didn’t yield more definitive results.

There’s good reason for that: According to various models, the commitments from various countries to cut greenhouse emissions cobbled together under the Copenhagen Accord would allow for well over 450 ppm of CO2 and result in a devastating temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius. Not only that, but they’re not truly commitments, in the sense that they don’t include an enforcement mechanism. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking: Scientists have coalesced over the past year around the view that a sort of tipping point to be reached in 2015; if global carbon levels aren’t dropping by then, many climate effects will be cascading and irreversible.

Morten Andersen, a blogger for the conference itself, described the scientists as “shell-shocked.” French climate scientist Herve Le Treut said, “What we have seen is the diverging interests of nation states and the planet.”

“Going above 450 parts per million will change everything. It’s not just one or two things,” Cynthia Rosenzweig, NASA climate impacts researcher, told the Associated Press. “There will be changes in water, food, ecosystems, health, and those changes also interact with each other.”

That’s very scary. From a political standpoint, however, the Copenhagen outcome may have been about the best that could have been expected — and there’s the possibility that it will yield a far better outcome than at first seems possible.

To New York Times uber-columnist Thomas Friedman, the American domestic push that gained momentum in Copenhagen is far more important than anything that had a prospect of coming out of Copenhagen:

Let me put it this way: Anything 192 countries could agree on would not be serious. Because it would be such a lowest common denominator that it’s not serious. At the end of the day, what I believe matters more than anything is what America does. Because if we lead it, more people will emulate us by just wanting to emulate us than will do the right thing by compulsion of a global treaty. What I care about is what 60 senators in the U.S. Senate will agree on and I want that to be a serious cap-and-trade or a serious carbon tax. If the U.S. leads—we still got a lot of juice—people will follow.

Friedman wants to see the drive for clean energy to become an “arms race” between the U.S. and China, which he contends could do more to reduce greenhouse emissions than any number of treaties could. It seems to me that he’s got a point.

The carrot for a more secure future is the prospect of clean energy. Paired with a bigger stick — a tough and verifiable treaty in Mexico — perhaps we have a chance to get greenhouse levels where they need to go.

Related posts:

1. Copenhagen yields minimal climate accord
2. Copenhagen so far: Accord or babel?
3. Copenhagen: Developing countries walk out
4. Copenhagen: Real progress in one week
5. Guardian: Climate conference “in disarray”