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.

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).

From NASA OMG Mission website -- Global sea level rise will be one of the major environmental challenges of the 21st Century. Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) will pave the way for improved estimates of sea level rise by addressing the question: To what extent are the oceans melting Greenland’s ice from below? Over a five-year campaign, OMG will observe changing water temperatures on the continental shelf surrounding Greenland, and how marine glaciers react to the presence of warm, salty Atlantic Water.

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 Climate  --  Time lapse of the age of sea ice in the Arctic from week to week since 1990, updated through the March 2016 winter maximum. The oldest ice (9 or more years old) is white. Seasonal ice is darkest blue. Old ice drifts out of the Arctic through the Fram Strait (east of Greenland), but in recent years, it has also been melting as it drifts into the southernmost waters of the Beaufort Sea (north of western Canada and Alaska).

Pluto is cold; the average surface temperature is just forty degrees Celsius above absolute zero. So how is there glacial activity on the distant body?

On Earth, glaciers form when enough snow builds up year after year to become ice. The compression of accumulated snow forces it to re-crystallize, forming larger grains. These grains grow larger, crushing out air pockets and the whole structure becomes more dense. Over the course of years, this snow will eventually become glacier ice.

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.