As of January 31, the Copenhagen Accord's first major deadline, 92 countries have submitted materials to the non-binding agreement, according to the UN's climate secretariat. They account for 75 percent of the world population, with human-propelled emissions adding up to 83 percent of the global total.

All the major greenhouse polluters have submitted plans for cutting their greenhouse pollution to the UN, including the five that jointly issued the accord in December: Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and United States.

The total is 100 short of the number that would be needed to adopt a legally binding treaty at November's climate meeting in Caracas, Mexico. But a couple assessments suggest that there is some reason for measured optimism.

"Whether we limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius [by 2100] also depends on what countries do after 2020," writes Trevor Howard, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who in 2009 was an advisor to US Special Climate Envoy Todd Stern.

As currently written, commitments under the accord through 2020 would not be enough to hold mean global warming to that target. But if I'm reading him correctly, Howard -- via quite a bit of charting and graphing -- seems to feel that the agreement's weaknesses could be its ultimate strengths, in that it allows for more nations to join on in the coming year, as well as for participating nations to create more stringent targets (which some say they'll do, if other nations jump in first).

"The results ... offer hope that the bottom-up approach the accord adopts can move the world in the right direction," Trevor writes.

Andrew Light of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress also sees some light glinting from the end of the tunnel. "The high end of proposals for reductions from all countries under the accord has gone from 8.7 gigatons of abatement by 2020 compared to a business-as-usual scenario up to 8.9 gigatons of reductions," he writes at Climate Progress.

This is apparently "only" about five gigatons short of the level needed to avert the worst impacts of climate change, according to current science.

Light goes on, 

The low end of proposals has improved from 3.6 gigatons to 4.9 gigatons, contingent, for example, on whether the United States will meet its stated commitment to emission reductions and whether developed countries provide sufficient financial incentives for developing countries to meet their targets.

 Light also stays optimistic about the potential for US action within the year, if not via legislation then through the EPA's regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act.

The Obama administration has been advancing its energy and climate action agenda by other means since the end of January. As George Peridas wrote last week on NRDC's advocacy blog, Switchboard, the administration has established an interagency task force on carbon capture and storage (CSS) policy.

(Despite some experiments around the world in the past few years -- such as this trial being planned for a rock formation beneath a town in the Netherlands -- CSS at an industrial scale is largely a technological phantasm so far.)

The administration has also created a blue ribbon commission to tackle next steps in storing nuclear waste, one of the major (non-political) blocks to revamping the American nuclear energy sector.

And yesterday, the Commerce Department announced the formation of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Service. Much as the National Weather Service makes weather data and analysis available to the public, the new service's mandate is to provide easy-to-access, centralized information on climate and the impacts of climate change, online at climate.gov, including raw data and assessments.

The climate service will harness the work and skills of hundreds of scientists already working on climate at NOAA.

The goal isn't enabling steps to prevent global warming, however -- "mitigation" in international climate-speak -- but to help governments and businesses plan more effectively to the changes that cannot be stopped.

"By providing critical planning information that our businesses and our communities need, NOAA Climate Service will help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change," said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke in a statement. "In the process, we'll discover new technologies, build new businesses and create new jobs."

Providing user-friendly climate data and analysis sounds straightforward enough. But setting up the climate service shifting around already-defined budget allocations in the Commerce Department. This will need to be approved by Congressional appropriations committees.

So keep your lawn chairs handy: there's still a chance for the climate service to be turned into a political football.