Under the Weather: Internal Report Says U.N. Climate Agency Rife With Bad Practices

As more than 10,000 delegates and observers gather in Poznan, Poland, to discuss the next phase in the battle against "climate change," a U.N. agency at the center of that hoopla badly needs to do some in-house weather-proofing.
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The Poznan conference, seen as a major step toward a negotiated successor to the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gases, is taking place until Dec. 12 under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a subsidiary of the World Meteorological Organization, a global association of scientific weather forecasters.

But 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 obtained by FOX News, 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.
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But even the full knowledge and consent of that council about some WMO activities doesn't remove all of the inspector's disquiet. The report notes that as part of its 2008-2011 strategic plan, the WMO and its various regional and technical subsidiaries intend to hold no fewer than 366 meetings of various sizes and scopes around the globe, or more than 80 per year. The JIU inspector, says the report, "has concerns related to the number of meetings and their productivity." He suggested "as a matter of priority" that the WMO cut back on meetings, "releasing resources for programming."

It is precisely for its programming — in global and regional climate prediction, natural disaster risk reduction, water resource monitoring and ostensibly definitive statements about the health of the earth's atmosphere — that WMO is now claiming a central role for itself in the U.N.'s anti-"climate change" crusade, which is emerging as the world body's most far-reaching attempt at international regulation.

Through programs like its Global Atmosphere Watch, World Hydrological cycle Observing system, Climate Variability and Predictability Project, and its WMO Space Program (using European Union weather satellites), and a welter of new partnerships around the world, the organization has positioned itself as the central monitor of climate change, and the source of most hard climatic information about its hazards.