Despite the debacle of the failed Copenhagen climate change conference last December, the United Nations is pressing full speed ahead with a plan for a greatly expanded system of global environmental governance and for a multitrillion-dollar economic transfer scheme to ignite the creation of a "global green economy."

In other words: Copenhagen without the authority — yet — of Copenhagen.

The world body even has chosen a time and a place for the culmination of the process: a World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, the 20th anniversary of the famed "Earth Summit" that gave focus and urgency to the world environmentalist movement.

The 2012 summit date is significant for another reason: It marks the end of the legal term of agreement for the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, which includes carbon reduction targets, and provided the legal basis for an international cap-and-trade market for carbon, centered in Europe. The U.S. first signed then backed away from the Kyoto deal without ratifying it; until its apparent collapse, the comprehensive Copenhagen deal was intended to include the U.S. and supplant Kyoto with a new, legally binding regime.

The new Rio summit will end, according to U.N. documents obtained by Fox News, with a "focused political document" presumably laying out the framework and international commitments to a new Green World Order.

More than 150 years of global temperature records are to be re-examined by scientists in an attempt to regain public trust in climate science after revelations about errors and suppression of data.

The Met Office has submitted proposals for the reassessment by an independent panel in a tacit admission that its previous reports have been marred by their reliance on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

Two separate inquiries are being held into allegations that the CRU tried to hide its raw data from critics and that it exaggerated the extent of global warming.

In a document entitled Proposal for a New International Analysis of Land Surface Air Temperature Data, the Met Office says: “We feel it is timely to propose an international effort to reanalyse surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation.”