If one believes Michael Grubb of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change will be seen as standing alongside the Treaty of Versailles and the Bretton Woods agreement as one of the major deals of the modern era.
It is probably too early to judge whether Mr Grubb has got it right. Nonetheless, the fact that 160 countries with very diverse agendas were able to agree on a protocol to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions blamed by scientists for causing climate change must be ranked as a significant step forward.
Apart from the preservation of biological diversity, progress on measures to curb climate change was the sine qua non of any credible international effort to protect the global environment. Though every country has its own environmental problems, the threat posed by climate changes eclipses them all.
This threat could be confronted only on the basis of equity. There was simply no way that developing countries such as China and India were going to agree to limit their greenhouse gas emissions without a "firm purpose of amendment" in advance from the industrialised nations which caused the problem in the first place.
That's why it was so important to get flexibility from the United States, as the world's largest single polluter, accounting for nearly 25 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions. The US came to Kyoto offering merely to stabilise its emissions at 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012, but left after agreeing to a 7 per cent reduction.
All the indications, however, are that the Kyoto deal hailed by President Clinton will not be ratified by the US Senate, at least with its present political complexion. And the fossil fuel lobby, led by the Global Climate Coalition, is already working hard to ensure that this important agreement bites the dust on the Senate floor.
The Kyoto protocol will be open for signature from next March, and it is expected that President Clinton will make quite a show of signing it. Along with his vice-president, Mr Al Gore, who hopes to be the Democratic Party's nominee for the White House in 2000, he seeks to court the large environmental lobby in the US.
Mr Clinton and Mr Gore may also be banking on the prospect that the influence of the fossil fuel lobby will begin to wane in the aftermath of Kyoto. Certainly, with the year-by-year rise in the number of weather-related catastrophes worldwide, it is likely that the insurance industry will become increasingly vocal.
1997 has been a year of spectacular disasters. The once-in-a-century floods in Poland, the Czech Republic and eastern Germany during last July and August caused 120 deaths, led to 187,000 people being evacuated from their homes and are estimated to have cost at least $5 billion in damage to property. Other extreme weather events in 1997 included the worst drought this century in northern China, the worst floods within living memory in East Africa, torrential rains and flash floods in the western US and a hurricane in Mexico which destroyed 97 per cent of the corn crop and damaged numerous tourist hotels in Acapulco.
Few but the "contrarians" continue to doubt the verdict of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change that human activity is altering our climate. There can also be little doubt that the next assessment from the IPCC, which is made up of 2,500 scientists from around the world, will consolidate this thesis.
By next autumn, when the fourth Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Change Convention gathers in Buenos Aires, the scientific evidence will be even stronger and major players such as the US will find it more difficult to argue in favour of loopholes to evade taking action to deal with the problem.
But even if the cuts in greenhouse gas emissions agreed in Kyoto had been as deep as the European Union initially sought, they would not have been enough to halt climate change. One way or the other, this phenomenon is likely to continue for 100 years or more, even if greenhouse gas emissions are stabilised.
What Kyoto did was to send out a message - however weak and compromised - that we need to change our ways. The profligate society which wastes the world's resources must yield to a more rational dispensation, which puts the emphasis on energy conservation, efficiency and the exploitation of renewable sources.
This is already happening, particularly in Europe. Greater use of urban public transport and national rail networks as well as unprecedented levels of investment in wind and solar energy are all paying dividends in terms of reducing atmospheric pollution and putting the EU at the forefront of technological innovation.
Though the EU managed to portray itself as "the light of the world" in Kyoto, it is still open to question whether it will now soften its commitment to achieve a 15 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2010 in any renegotiation of its current burden-sharing arrangement - the so-called "bubble". Under the present deal, Ireland is meant to cap the increase in its emissions at 15 per cent - a target which IBEC, for example, regards as quite unrealistic. For without firm action, as the Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, warned in Kyoto, Ireland's emissions could be 55 per cent higher in the year 2010.
The acid test of the EU's commitment will be whether its 15 finance ministers can agree on a Union-wide carbon tax. This was originally floated by the European Commission in 1992, at the time of the Earth Summit, but it has since become bogged down in the mire of consensus decision-making on fiscal measures.
Britain's deputy prime minister, Mr John Prescott, has said that Kyoto provided a "window of credibility" for the industrialised world to show the developing countries it was genuinely prepared to take action on climate change. If they are to be brought on board, that credibility will have to be built on between now and Buenos Aires.