It’s certainly interesting that UN climate chief Yvo de Boer called the Copenhagen accord’s first deadline “soft” in a news conference on Wednesday. We won’t know until 31 January how many countries elect to sign onto the accord, but statements downplaying the significance of the date itself would seem to suggest that the number may be on the low side.

That said, it’s not at all clear that the accord itself “lay in tatters,” as the Financial Times described it, or that an important deadline has been formally “dropped,” as the Guardian suggests. The deadline might well represent a vote of confidence, but on another level de Boer was simply stating the truth – and reiterating a message delivered in Copenhagen – that the accord is not a legal document and therefore has no legal deadlines.

Clearly the situation would be dire were a member of the “BASIC” group – Brazil, South Africa, India, China – to abstain, given that they were the principal authors of the accord along with the United States. Alarm bells might ring if two-dozen or so other countries that blessed the agreement prior to its release in Copenhagen elected to wait. But nobody I’ve talked to has a clear and convincing interpretation of the significance of a decision to hold off – or join – on the part of everybody else.

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The fact of the matter is that countries don’t have to make a decision now, nor is there a clear and compelling benefit to those who do. Heads of state departed Copenhagen with the outline of a global warming agreement that sets a broad target and puts cash on the table in exchange for verifiable action on the part of developing countries. But the mechanisms for implementing the agreement – namely verifying actions and transferring cash – have yet to be worked out.

The United States’ climate envoy, Todd Stern, recently said these are issues that negotiators hope to address in the run-up to the next meeting in Mexico later this year. There negotiators will once again seek a full agreement among all countries, driven in large part by the need to succeed Kyoto Protocol, which is silent on emissions after 2012. That agreement need not necessarily be based on the Copenhagen accord, but there don’t appear to be any alternatives. And that is one reason why even de Boer has blessed continued negotiations among a smaller group of nations as a precursor to broader discussions at the global level, an idea that has long been anathema to many in the UN process.

All of which is to say that it could be a while before we can deliver a prognosis on the Copenhagen accord with any degree of confidence.