[classicman]

I think its premature to judge whether Copenhagen was positive or negative. However others who were there and in differing capacities some leaders others not felt that it was a failure.
Fact - 160 nations merely "took note" of the Copenhagen Climate Treaty. Most of them because they felt the political need to do so. They couldn't come out of there with nothing. They needed a showpiece, something no matter how meaningless to say " Look what we did". In reality, it is worth little more than the paper they wasted to place their signatures upon. Most of the countries didn't sign because they realized it was too weak and little more than a political declaration meant to conceal the failure of the conference.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday that he is dissatisfied with the results of the recent climate change conference in Copenhagen. "It was a lot of hot air. Unfortunately, no agreement was reached," The fact is that it did fail, and miserably.

Only several countries (30 out of 190) signed the agreement. Most analysts outside the US say the Copenhagen talks have failed.

Swedish Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren, "But of course, this was mainly about other countries being unwilling, especially the United States and China."

Many countries feel that it did not go far enough and it contained no mechanisms to make it binding.
Also, developing nations have plenty of experience in unfulfilled promises and funding commitments. Many of these have openly rejected the treaty and fired angry accusations at the major industrialized powers, which would be primarily responsible for what some have described as a horrific form of genocide.

The Swedish EU presidency, which is in its final days, has blasted the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, as a "disaster."
No treaty materialized at Copenhagen, where some leaders managed to only "take note" of an accord that communicates the desire to limit the temperature increase to 3.6 degrees F but spells out no concrete targets

The biggest step Copenhagen could have taken to stimulate the green economy would have been to send a strong signal that the price of carbon dioxide pollution will rise.
But the deal that emerged in the early hours of Saturday included no national carbon dioxide caps. It laid down an ambition to keep global temperature rise to within 2C - and even then they won't be legally binding.
"Copenhagen was a big setback for investors who wanted clear and credible policy signals," says Nick Robins from HSBC.

It was denounced as an 'abject failure' by some, while Kumi Naidoo, the new head of Greenpeace International, declared that, except for the science, 'everything else is a fraud'. Indeed, the draft deal, is no way close to what is necessary to save the planet from the onslaughts of climate change in the not-so-distant future.

Bill McKibben, the environmental writer who organized the largest worldwide climate demonstration in history last fall, assessed COP15 this way: It was a train wreck, but a fascinating one, revealing an enormous amount about the structure of the globe."
Obama offered no bold new ideas, no surprises that might have changed the outcome of the conference. For many, the postmortem will conclude that the president has not yet lived up to his earlier promises that the United States will lead the world on climate action, and he undermined the international respect for America he so carefully rebuilt during his first year in office.

These are just a few of the opinions of people who were there and who are far more knowledgeable than us.
The more I read about the world view outside of the US, the more I see that this was nothing short of a failure.