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Old 01-27-2011, 07:31 AM   #107
scottw
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The 2010 data confirm the Earth’s significant long-term warming trend,” according to World Meteorological Organization chief Michel Jarraud. “The ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998.”


it also confirms that there has been no statistically significant warming occuring since 1995...Phil Jones of CRU admitted that in a BBC interview....seems like a plateau to me rather than constant warming reflected by ever increasing carbon emissions.....we should be trending ever warmer...shoud we not? 2010 was slightly cooler than previous record years....is that not a trend?

why do you assume I get my info from the radio?

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The WMO, the $80 million U.N. front-line agency in the climate change struggle, and the source for much of the world’s information in the global atmosphere and water supply, has serious management problems of its own, despite its rapidly expanding global ambitions.

The international agency has been sharply criticized by a U.N. inspection unit in a confidential report for, among other things, haphazard budget practices, deeply flawed organizational procedures, and no effective oversight by the 188 nations that formally make up its membership and dole out its funds.

• Click here to see the Joint Inspection Unit report.

The inspection was carried out by a member of the United Nations Joint Inspection Unit (JIU), a small, independent branch of the U.N. that reports to the General Assembly and is mandated to improve the organization’s efficiency and coordination through its inspection process.

The investigations took place in late 2006 and extended through at least May 2007, and subsequently were presented to the WMO’s ruling bodies and its secretary general, Michel Jarraud, in December 2007. It was forwarded to the U.N. General Assembly only in November 2008.
The confidential document was a follow-up to an earlier examination in 2004, which also led to suggestions for greater internal controls of the WMO. (That inspection followed the discovery in 2003 of a multi-million-dollar embezzlement of WMO funds by an employee who subsequently disappeared.)

According to the more recent report, the WMO still has a lot of changing to do — starting with the agency’s far-flung regional offices, which the WMO touts as key units in the climate change struggle, especially in helping the world’s poorest people. But in the report, the regional offices are described as being of “questionable” value, and the organization’s plans to bolster its scientific programs in poor countries are said to be based on “ad hoc demands” rather than carefully examined needs.

Moreover, the report says, “there is no systematic, regular reporting by the offices in the regions to headquarters regarding their activities, achievements, performance or lessons learned.” The JIU inspector declared it “imperative” that the WMO get better reporting from its local offices.

Similar quality-control problems apparently infect the WMO’s Geneva head office, where, the report dryly notes, “a results-oriented culture is lacking among staff.” Among other things, the report notes that WMO “suffers from the lack of a set of internal procedures, guidelines and instructions regarding work processes, departmental responsibilities and workflow” — administrative lapses that were “particularly the case in the budget preparation process.”

• Click here to see the Joint Inspection Unit report.

In a survey done by the JIU inspector, more than 58 percent of the WMO’s staff found the level of coordination and cooperation in their organization “inadequate.” (And elsewhere, the report notes, “it is a cause for concern that 30% of staff had seen conduct in recent months that they thought violated the WMO Code of Ethics.”)

While the WMO has unveiled a 2008-2011 strategic plan that envisages new levels of international coordination in “monitoring, assessing and forecasting weather, air quality, climate, oceanic conditions, the global water cycle, and hydro-meteorological hazards,” the inspection report declares that the U.N.’s own forecast on how to get to that level of achievement is disturbingly hazy. (Among other things, the WMO has declared its intention to “modernize” the meteorological infrastructure in at least 40 countries its four-year plan, “with a particular focus on developing countries.”)

As the document puts it, there is not “a sufficiently clear or measurable link” between the goals of the WMO plan and the way that the organization’s top bureaucrats propose to achieve them.

Last edited by scottw; 01-27-2011 at 07:43 AM..
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