What Can I Do To Help Fight Climate Change

NASA is a world leader in climate studies and World science. While its role is non to fix climate policy or prescribe item responses or solutions to climate change, its purview does include providing the robust scientific information needed to sympathise climate alter. NASA then makes this information bachelor to the global community – the public, policy- and decision-makers and scientific and planning agencies around the earth.

city climate change — Credit: kwest/Shutterstock.com

Climate change is one of the nearly complex problems facing the states today. It involves many dimensions – science, economics, club, politics and moral and ethical questions – and is a global problem, felt on local scales, that will exist around for decades and centuries to come. Carbon dioxide, the oestrus-trapping greenhouse gas that has driven contempo global warming, lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and the planet (specially the oceans) takes a while to reply to warming. So even if nosotros stopped emitting all greenhouse gases today, global warming and climate change will continue to bear on hereafter generations. In this way, humanity is "committed" to some level of climate change.

How much climate alter? That will be determined past 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 commencement time in man history. The last time levels were that high was most three to five million years agone, during the Pliocene Epoch.

Because nosotros are already committed to some level of climatic change, responding to climate change involves a 2-pronged approach:

Reducing emissions of and stabilizing the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere ("mitigation");
Adapting to the climatic change already in the pipeline ("adaptation").

Mitigation and Adaptation

solar panels — Credit: trekandshoot/Shutterstock.com

Mitigation – reducing climatic change – involves reducing the flow of estrus-trapping greenhouse gases into the temper, 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 equally the oceans, forests and soil). The goal of mitigation is to avoid pregnant human interference with the climate organisation, and "stabilize greenhouse gas levels in a timeframe sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate alter, ensure that food product is not threatened and to enable economic development to go along in a sustainable manner" (from the 2014 report on Mitigation of Climate change from the United nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Alter, folio four).

Accommodation – 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 furnishings of climatic change (like sea-level encroachment, more intense extreme weather events or food insecurity). Information technology likewise encompasses making the nigh of any potential beneficial opportunities associated with climate change (for case, 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. Climatic change (drought in particular) has been at to the lowest degree 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 evolution of our modern culture and life as nosotros know it. Modern life is tailored to the stable climate we have go accustomed to. As our climate changes, we volition take to learn to adapt. The faster the climate changes, the harder it could exist.

While climate change is a global issue, information technology is felt on a local scale. Cities and municipalities are therefore at the frontline of accommodation. In the absence of national or international climate policy direction, cities and local communities around the earth have been focusing on solving their own climate problems. They are working to build inundation defenses, program for heatwaves and higher temperatures, install h2o-permeable pavements to better bargain with floods and stormwater and amend water storage and use.

Co-ordinate to the 2014 study on Climate Change Impacts, Accommodation and Vulnerability (page 8) from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Modify, governments at various levels are also getting better at adaptation. Climate modify is starting to exist factored into a variety of development plans: how to manage the increasingly farthermost 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 program for reduced h2o availability, how to develop resilient crop varieties and how to protect free energy and public infrastructure.

How NASA is Involved

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

NASA makes detailed climate data available to the global customs – the public, policy- and conclusion-makers and scientific and planning agencies effectually the globe. Information technology is non NASA'due south role to fix climate policy or prescribe particular responses or solutions to climate alter. NASA is one of 13 U.Southward. government agencies that form function of the U.S. Global Change Research Programme, which has a legal mandate to assist the nation and the earth understand, assess, predict and reply to global change. These U.S. partner agencies include the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Free energy, each of which has a different purview depending on their surface area of expertise.

Started in 2010, NASA's Carbon Monitoring Organization (CMS) is a forward-looking initiative established under management 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 1 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 take major ramifications for how our planet will respond to increasing emissions and/or efforts to combat climatic change. The work will besides help inform near-term policy development and planning.

NASA'south related Megacities Carbon Project is focused on the problem of accurately measuring and monitoring greenhouse-gas emissions from the earth's biggest cities. About iii-quarters of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions come from about 2 percent of the country 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 in that location. The goal is to add other cities effectually the world and to ultimately deploy a worldwide urban carbon monitoring system that volition enable local policymakers to fully account for the many sources and sinks of carbon and how they change over time.

Although NASA'due south main focus is not on energy-engineering science research and development, work is beingness washed around the agency and by/with diverse partners and collaborators to find viable alternative sources of free energy to power our needs. These sources of energy include the air current, waves, the Sun and biofuels.

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