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According to NASA, Climate Change is a broad range of global phenomena created predominantly by burning fossil fuels, which add heat-trapping gases to Earth’s atmosphere.

It also refers to the increasing changes in the measures of climate over a long period of time – including precipitation, temperature, and wind patterns.

These phenomena include the increased temperature trends described by global warming, but also encompass changes such as sea-level rise; ice mass loss in Greenland, Antarctica, the Arctic and mountain glaciers worldwide; shifts in flower/plant blooming; and extreme weather events.

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Fossil fuels

Deforestation

Intense farming

Waste disposal

Mining

Over consumption

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On biodiversity- The increase of temperatures and the climate upheavals disturb the ecosystems.

On Oceans- Because of global warming, permafrost and ice are melting massively at the poles, increasing the sea level.

On humans- It is already shaking up social, health and geopolitical balances in many parts of the world.

On the weather- more droughts and heat waves, more precipitations, more natural disasters like floods, hurricanes, storms and wildfires, frost-free season, etc.

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Link for more information about Climate Change

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Link for more information about Climate Change

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Global Warming - Solutions to solve global warming

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Global warming is one of the most important threats in the world today. How to reduce global warming? Find out the causes and effects of global warming.

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The world is already experiencing changes in average temperature, shifts in the seasons and an increasing frequency of extreme weather events and other climate change impacts and slow onset events. The faster the climate changes, and the longer adaptation efforts are put off, the more difficult and expensive it could be.

Adaptation refers to adjustments in ecological, social, or economic systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli and their effects or impacts. It refers to changes in processes, practices, and structures to moderate potential damages or to benefit from opportunities associated with climate change. In simple terms, countries and communities need to develop adaptation solution and implement action to respond to the impacts of climate change that are already happening, as well as prepare for future impacts.

Adaptation solutions take many shapes and forms, depending on the unique context of a community, business, organization, country or region. There is no 'one-size-fits-all-solution'-adaptation can range from building flood defences, setting up early warning systems for cyclones and switching to drought-resistant crops, to redesigning communication systems, business operations and government policies. Many nations and communities are already taking steps to build resilient societies and economies, but considerably greater action and ambition will be needed to cost-effectively manage the risks, both now and in the future.

Successful adaptation not only depends on governments but also on the active and sustained engagement of stakeholders including national, regional, multilateral and international organizations, the public and private sectors, civil society and other relevant stakeholders, as well as effective management of knowledge. Adaptation to the impacts of climate change may be undertaken across various regions, and sectors, and at various levels.

Parties to the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement recognize that adaptation is a global challenge faced by all with local, subnational, national, regional and international dimensions. It is a key component of the long-term global response to climate change to protect people, livelihoods and ecosystems. Parties acknowledge that adaptation action should follow a country-driven, gender-responsive, participatory and fully transparent approach, considering vulnerable groups, communities and ecosystems, and should be based on and guided by the best available science and, as appropriate, traditional knowledge, knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems, with a view to integrating adaptation into relevant socioeconomic and environmental policies and actions.
How do parties address adaptation?
The figure above shows graphically the adaptation cycle under the UN climate change regime, including four general components, which are individually featured under the SPOTLIGHT section (at the bottom of this page).
Within the UN climate change regime, Parties carry out adaptation-related activities in a number of workstreams, through work programmes and in specialized groups and committees. These include:

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What do adaptation to climate change and climate resilience mean? | UNFCCC

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The world is already experiencing changes in average temperature, shifts in the seasons and an increasing frequency of extreme weather events and other climate change impacts and slow onset events. The faster the climate changes, and the longer adaptation efforts are put off, the more difficult and expensive it could be.

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Link for Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change

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Link for Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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NASA is a world leader in climate studies and Earth science. While its role is not to set climate policy or prescribe particular responses or solutions to climate change, its purview does include providing the robust scientific data needed to understand climate change. NASA then makes this information available to the global community - the public, policy- and decision-makers and scientific and planning agencies around the world.

Credit: kwest/Shutterstock.com

Climate change is one of the most complex issues facing us today. It involves many dimensions - science, economics, society, politics and moral and ethical questions - and is a global problem, felt on local scales, that will be around for decades and centuries to come. Carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas that has driven recent global warming, lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and the planet (especially the oceans) takes a while to respond to warming. So even if we stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, global warming and climate change will continue to affect future generations. In this way, humanity is "committed" to some level of climate change.

How much climate change? That will be determined by how our emissions continue and exactly how our climate system responds to those emissions. Despite increasing awareness of climate change, our emissions of greenhouse gases continue on a relentless rise. In 2013, the daily level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in human history. The last time levels were that high was about three to five million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch.

Because we are already committed to some level of climate change, responding to climate change involves a two-pronged approach:

1. Reducing emissions of and stabilizing the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere ("mitigation");

2. Adapting to the climate change already in the pipeline ("adaptation").

Mitigation and Adaptation

Credit: trekandshoot/Shutterstock.com

Mitigation - reducing climate change - involves reducing the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, either by reducing sources of these gases (for example, the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat or transport) or enhancing the "sinks" that accumulate and store these gases (such as the oceans, forests and soil). The goal of mitigation is to avoid significant human interference with the climate system, and "stabilize greenhouse gas levels in a timeframe sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner" (from the 2014 report on Mitigation of Climate Change from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, page 4).

Adaptation - adapting to life in a changing climate - involves adjusting to actual or expected future climate. The goal is to reduce our vulnerability to the harmful effects of climate change (like sea-level encroachment, more intense extreme weather events or food insecurity). It also encompasses making the most of any potential beneficial opportunities associated with climate change (for example, longer growing seasons or increased yields in some regions).

Throughout history, people and societies have adjusted to and coped with changes in climate and extremes with varying degrees of success. Climate change (drought in particular) has been at least partly responsible for the rise and fall of civilizations. Earth's climate has been relatively stable for the past 12,000 years and this stability has been crucial for the development of our modern civilization and life as we know it. Modern life is tailored to the stable climate we have become accustomed to. As our climate changes, we will have to learn to adapt. The faster the climate changes, the harder it could be.

While climate change is a global issue, it is felt on a local scale. Cities and municipalities are therefore at the frontline of adaptation. In the absence of national or international climate policy direction, cities and local communities around the world have been focusing on solving their own climate problems. They are working to build flood defenses, plan for heatwaves and higher temperatures, install water-permeable pavements to better deal with floods and stormwater and improve water storage and use.

According to the 2014 report on Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (page 8) from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, governments at various levels are also getting better at adaptation. Climate change is starting to be factored into a variety of development plans: how to manage the increasingly extreme disasters we are seeing and their associated risks, how to protect coastlines and deal with sea-level encroachment, how to best manage land and forests, how to deal with and plan for reduced water availability, how to develop resilient crop varieties and how to protect energy and public infrastructure.

How NASA is Involved

NASA, with its Eyes on the Earth and wealth of knowledge on the Earth's climate system and its components, is one of the world's experts in climate science. NASA's purview is to provide the robust scientific data needed to understand climate change. Forexample, data from the agency's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) missions and from radar instruments in space have shown rapid changes in the Earth's great ice sheets. The Jason-3, Jason-2/OSTM Surface Topography Mission (OSTM) and Jason-1 missions have documented an increasing sea level since 1992.

NASA makes detailed climate data available to the global community - the public, policy- and decision-makers and scientific and planning agencies around the world. It is not NASA's role to set climate policy or prescribe particular responses or solutions to climate change. NASA is one of 13 U.S. government agencies that form part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which has a legal mandate to help the nation and the world understand, assess, predict and respond to global change. These U.S. partner agencies include the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, each of which has a different purview depending on their area of expertise.

Started in 2010, NASA's Carbon Monitoring System (CMS) is a forward-looking initiative established under direction by the U.S. government. The CMS is improving the monitoring of global carbon stocks (where carbon is stored around the planet) and fluxes (how carbon is cycled from one stock to the next). The ultimate goal is to make breakthroughs in quantifying, understanding and predicting how worldwide carbon sources and sinks are changing, since this could have major ramifications for how our planet will respond to increasing emissions and/or efforts to combat climate change. The work will also help inform near-term policy development and planning.

NASA's related Megacities Carbon Project is focused on the problem of accurately measuring and monitoring greenhouse-gas emissions from the world's biggest cities. About three-quarters of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions come from about 2 percent of the land surface - the cities and the power plants that feed them. At present the focus is on pilot projects in Los Angeles and Paris that sample the air there. The goal is to add other cities around the world and to ultimately deploy a worldwide urban carbon monitoring system that will enable local policymakers to fully account for the many sources and sinks of carbon and how they change over time.

Although NASA's main focus is not on energy-technology research and development, work is being done around the agency and by/with various partners and collaborators to find viable alternative sources of energy to power our needs. These sources of energy include the wind, waves, the Sun and biofuels.

Related Articles

For further reading on NASA's work on mitigation and adaptation, take a look at the articles listed below.

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Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation

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NASA is a world leader in climate studies and Earth science. While its role is not to set climate policy or prescribe particular responses or solutions to climate change, its purview does include providing the robust scientific data needed to understand climate change.

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The following is a guest post from Scott Cormier, VP of Emergency Management, Environment of Care and Safety at Medxcel Facilities Management.

Natural disasters cause nearly 500 deaths annually in the United States. Unfortunately, healthcare facilities in the U.S. continue to fall short in disaster planning and preparedness. This lack of preparation creates the potential for serious ramifications, putting staff, patients and the financial security of the hospital at risk. Below are five key components to an effective emergency management plan.

1. Clear communication

In the past, it's often been a natural reaction for organizations to try to withhold information from the public. This is the wrong approach. Healthcare facilities can prove their worth to their communities by being open and honest. In today's world, information will leak out one way or another, so it's essential the public gets the correct information from the healthcare experts instead of the wrong information from someone else.

During a disaster, everyone inside the organization needs to be informed. To effectively manage an emergency, all personnel must be on the same page - medical, legal, government affairs, and facilities management, among others, have to understand what's going on.

2. Comprehensive training

Your facility may not face an emergency situation for many years. While there is no substitute for the real thing, training is vital to ensuring your staff is as prepared as possible.

Another important factor to consider when implementing a training plan is community involvement. Healthcare facilities may assume they will have the full cooperation of local ambulance services, police and fire departments, but those agencies often have other responsibilities in the event of a natural disaster. Establishing their role during training is essential to emergency management preparations.

3. Knowledge of assets

Naturally, many people panic in the face of disaster. This places a heavy burden on government agencies and other local resources to provide relief for people dealing with a large-scale emergency. Hospitals cannot depend on outside help. It is imperative that healthcare facilities take stock of their assets in order to understand capabilities and limitations ahead of any natural disaster.

4. Technology fail-safes and protocol

Every hospital has a medical records department. Those departments need a certain amount of physical space, access to files and software systems to get through every day. What happens when a disaster occurs and knocks the software systems offline, or blocks access to records? How will the hospital operate? Unfortunately, healthcare facilities often wait until a disaster has created a problem before trying to find a solution, losing precious time in the process. A business continuity plan helps to identify the hardware, software, space and other resources that each area of your facility requires to remain operational. It is crucial to recognize these needs in order to develop alternative solutions before any of the requirements are disrupted by disaster.

5. Healthcare leadership involvement

Every hospital is focused on patient healing and safety. Occasionally, disaster preparedness is seen as a secondary pursuit, less impactful than the demands of day to day healthcare. However, the ability to keep your facility open and treating patients during a disaster is an enormous asset to the community, as well as a significant revenue generator.

Healthcare facility leadership must understand the importance of a strong emergency management program and devote the proper resources towards disaster preparations. Employees with disaster response experience are vital pieces of the emergency management process - they keep facilities from spiraling out of control. More importantly, they enable your hospital to continue functioning and generating revenue. An effective emergency management department is a valuable insurance policy.

A natural disaster can wreak havoc on an entire community in an instant. If your healthcare facility is not equipped to respond, you lose the community's trust as well as a significant revenue stream. Expert emergency management is essential to the safety of staff, patients, and the hospital's financial security.

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Disaster preparedness: 5 key components to effective emergency management

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The following is a guest post from Scott Cormier, VP of Emergency Management, Environment of Care and Safety at Medxcel Facilities Management. Natural disasters cause nearly 500 deaths annually in the United States. Unfortunately, healthcare facilities in the U.S. continue to fall short in disaster planning and preparedness.