The authors offer a provisional assessment of where the Kyoto negotiations have left the climate change issue. They present a few widely divergent assesments of what the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change will accomplish, and describe some differing interpretations of its text in the context of the underlying international disagreement, as well as in differing perceptions of the underlying science and economics. The paper includes a brief but up-to-date summary of what we know and don't know about human influences on climate, and what it might take to restrain them. © 1998 Council on Foreign Relations