Climate change is one of today's most hotly debated topics, not only in America but around the world. This series features firsthand accounts from people who have been affected by the occurrence, with a team of correspondents from the entertainment and news industries traveling around the world to report on effects of global warming and what people are doing to find solutions for it. Among the stories told are Oscar-winner Matt Damon's reporting on the health impact of heat waves around the globe, Golden Globe-winner Michael C.

From the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)  --  It took 200,000 years for our human population to reach 1 billion—and only 200 years to reach 7 billion. But growth has begun slowing, as women have fewer babies on average. When will our global population peak? And how can we minimize our impact on Earth’s resources, even as we approach 11 billion?

The video is available for download at: http://media.amnh.org/sciencebulletins/AMNH_HumanPopulation_DOWNLOAD.mp4

We hear all the time that we need to stop the planet from warming an additional two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Why is that specific number so important though? And what happens if we exceed that limit? PBS News Hour offers some background on that climate science target (this is a complete transcript (link is external) for the video).

Did you know NASA has studied Earth more than any other planet in our solar system? It's one of NASA's most important missions and its unique capabilities in space give us a global view of our changing planet. Subscribe in YouTube to this bi-weekly animated series as NASA looks at earth science topics and explains why climate change is a big deal in 90 seconds or less.

From NOAA Visualizations - Fundamental changes in seawater chemistry are occurring throughout the world's oceans. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) from humankind's industrial and agricultural activities has increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The ocean absorbs almost a third of the CO2 we release into the atmosphere every year, so as atmospheric CO2 levels increase, so do the levels in the ocean. Initially, many scientists focused on the benefits of the ocean removing this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

Rain, snow, hail, ice, and every slushy mix in between make up the precipitation that touches everyone on our planet. But not all places rain equally. Precipitation falls differently in different parts of the world, as you see in NASA's new video that captures every shower, every snow storm and every hurricane from August 4 to August 14, 2014. The GPM Core Observatory, co-led by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), was launched on Feb 27, 2014, and provides advanced instruments that can see rain and falling snow all the way through the atmosphere.

There is so much to like in this eleven minute video: physics, biology, chemistry, geology, and some wild and fantastic scientific speculation!  Add to that a curiously captivating and eccentric narrator named vsauce, and you have the ingredients for a great warm-up video to a discussion of the solar system and the importance of the sun to Earths  biosphere.

This one pretty much speaks for itself.  I had the honor of listening to Carl speak in person once, during a Planetary Society event following the impact of Shoemaker-Levey-9 into Jupiter.  He was every bit the science star I belived him to be.  He helped ignight my love of science with his Cosmos book and series.  This audio clip from his book "Pale Blue Dot" is read by Carl himself, and is shown to my students every Earth Day.

I ask my students to see how many epic movie clips they recognize.  The answer gets smaller every year!

This video is from the American Museum of Natural History's Science Bulletins collection. "As the leading greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is one of the atmosphere’s most closely watched ingredients. The scrutiny began in 1958, when a young geochemist named Charles Keeling began regularly measuring CO2 atop a massive Hawaiian volcano—and discovered some intriguing patterns.