It is easy to write off the big international climate negotiations that the United Nations regularly convenes, such as the one that unfolded in Glasgow, Scotland, over the past two weeks. Inside the chamber, global negotiators haggle over the tiniest of word choices in mind-numbingly dull proceedings that can seem detached from reality. (As though anyone outside the U.N. process cares if nations are “urged” or “requested” to update their emissions targets.) Outside, seemingly nothing would be enough for the protesters screaming that world leaders are betraying future generations. Experts chime in to say that the world still has time to stave off extreme warming but that the window is closing, and global commitments remain short of what they need to be.

Yet, despite the seeming stasis, there is also progress. Slow, hard, but real progress. Cumbersome as it is, the U.N. system is still the best hope the world has to address global warming, and the Glasgow conference showed why once again.

If humanity is to have any chance to fight climate change, nations cannot act in isolation. Like the highly effective General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade process, which convened countries to successively cut trade barriers during the 20th century, the United Nations’ role is to minimize countries’ mutual suspicions and to persuade them to work in the best interests of all. Nations are expected to come to its conferences with new pledges and to face international accountability for the ones they made before. The system is voluntary at every stage — there is no other realistic option in a world of sovereign states — but this climate diplomacy has produced results.

In Glasgow, U.S. and Chinese negotiators announced a new pact in which China promised to begin phasing out coal this decade and to slash emissions of methane, a short-lived but potent greenhouse agent. Scores of countries, including hydrocarbon powerhouse Saudi Arabia, pledged to cut methane emissions 30 percent by 2030, which would help prevent humanity from reaching dangerous climate tipping points in the next few decades. Glasgow saw $19 billion in pledges to fight deforestation and increasingly assertive private sector mobilization. Energy-hungry India finally committed to reach net-zero emissions this century.

The most important achievements occurred before the Glasgow meeting even convened, as countries prepared by boosting the 2030 emissions commitments they made at the 2015 Paris climate conference. No, the pledges are not enough; a U.N. report found that they would still result in an average temperature rise of 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100. But that is better than the 3 degrees U.N. experts previously projected. And if nations keep meeting, with the expectation that they must continually up their ambition, that number will continue to decline. At Glasgow, negotiators even considered calling for updated pledges every year rather than every five.

International negotiators will still have to sort out countless details, and protesters will still be unsatisfied. World leaders may ultimately fail to keep warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the level that scientists warn humanity should not breach. But that is no basis for fatalism. Every fraction of a degree rise avoided translates into a substantial amount of human suffering forgone.