A mere week ago, few observers anticipated that the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would produce a positive result. The atmosphere at the Bonn meeting was grim, even despairing, about the prospects of an agreement on how to implement the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It appeared to have been fatally undermined by the US decision to disown Kyoto, declaring it "dead in the water". There was little indication that other major industrialised countries such as Japan, Canada and Australia, were really prepared to do a deal that would protect the environmental integrity of the Protocol.
If a week is a long time in politics, it can be even longer in the hothouse atmosphere of international negotiations. UN conferences on climate change have become notorious for their all-night sessions and Bonn was no exception. But it will go down in history as the place where a breakthrough was made in confronting what Mr Al Gore, the former US Vice President, described as the most serious environmental challenge facing humanity - the threat posed by global warning.
Although compromised by last-minute concessions, the Bonn Agreement is a remarkable building block in constructing the architecture for Kyoto. The fact that it was produced with the consent of no less than 178 countries, is in itself a vindication of the whole process of multilateral negotiations and, indeed, of the United Nations itself. It has become fashionable in the United States to attack the UN, but Bonn showed that it can work - and work very well.
It is now clear that the Bush administration made a strategic error in assuming that Kyoto was dead without US participation. For the loneliest position at yesterday's final plenary session was occupied by the US Secretary of State, Ms Paula Dobriansky, as the rest of the international community - in the truest sense of the term - cheered when the historic agreement was adopted and gave a well-deserved standing ovation to Mr Jan Pronk, who had done so much to orchestrate it.
The Bonn Agreement sends out a clear message that all but one of the world's richest, industrialised countries are prepared to take at least the first tentative steps towards dealing with principal causes of climate change. A similar message is sent out to business and industry; indeed, the deal will create a market for trading in carbon dioxide emissions, thereby assigning a value for the first time to the need for all countries - including Ireland - to begin reducing their reliance on fossil fuels.
However much environmentalists might wish the process to be faster, a good week's work has been done in Bonn. The operation to rescue the Kyoto Protocol has succeeded. All those involved can return home and look their children in the eye.