The Globe: If there was one moment when the near-moribund climate-change negotiations began to revive, it was yesterday at 12:30 p.m. in Copenhagen.

That's when the leaders of the two countries at the centre of the impasse - U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao - retreated to a room in the Bella Center, the airport-size convention hall that has played host to the near round-the-clock climate negotiations since Dec. 7.

That meeting could have gone either way. As it turned out, it was successful enough to trigger a rapid-fire series of other meetings that produced a deal among four key countries - the United States, China, India and South Africa. Some countries were not immediately on side, but the outline of a climate-change agreement known as the Copenhagen Accord had taken shape. Canada later supported it, as did Germany, France and Britain.
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