Across the globe, countries are investing in science and deem it critical for society. Yet scientists are facing funding issues, due to forces such as the sequester. How does a scientist navigate the tensions between the scientific enterprise and public attitudes toward science? Alan Leshner, Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Executive Publisher of the journal Science, shares insights on the state of science today, how the public perceives science, and how scientists can better communicate with the public. Published on May 1, 2013

Marine Biologist, Dr. Stephen Palumbi, discusses the oceans and global warming which is transforming our environment. The temperature, acidity and water level of the ocean is rising. These changes are increasing in speed and magnitude and their effects will last for centuries. Corals are among those organisms hit hardest by global warming. The rate our climate changes will determine whether coral can survive or not. Uploaded on Nov 5, 2008

Director of Cape Farewell, David Buckland at The Walrus Talks Sustainability. Cape Farewell is an international not-for-profit programme based in the Science Museum's Dana Centre in London and with a North American foundation based at the MaRS centre in Toronto.

Published on Nov 26, 2013

TEDxBrussels and Published on Nov 3, 2013

 You don't need your whole brain to be aware. Why does this matter? Dr. Steven Laureys, MD, PhD, leads the Coma Science Group at the Cyclotron Research Center and Department of Neurology, Sart Tilman Liège University Hospital .

Published on Sep 4, 2013

Have a question that's always confounded you about Earth's climate? Wonder why it matters that the climate is changing now if it has changed before? Or how scientists know changes seen in recent decades are the result of human activities, not natural causes?

Go ahead. Ask a climate scientist.

To submit a question, record a short, 10-15 second video with your question and upload it to YouTube -- and be sure to tag the video "#askclimate" so that we can find it. You can also simply post a question on Twitter with the same hashtag, "#askclimate."
NASA scientists will be recording video responses to some of the questions we receive. The responses will be posted to the NASAExplorer YouTube channel.

Is there any merit to the studies that show that historical CO2 levels lag behind temperature, and not lead them?
Yes, there's merit to those studies, says Peter Hildebrand, Director of the Earth Science Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, responding to a question from Twitter (https://twitter.com/Seth_b_clark/stat...).

In the pre-industrial age, the CO2 response to temperature was that the temperature would go up and CO2 would go up. Or if the temperature went down, CO2 would go down. Because when the temperature rose, the whole biosphere revved up and emitted CO2. So we understand that process.

In the post-industrial age, the opposite is true. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is leading to increased temperature. So two different things happened, one pre-industrial, where temperature was driving the CO2, and post-industrial, where CO2 was driving temperature. Which means a completely different physical-biological process is going on.Published on Sep 24, 2013

For more about Ask A Climate Scientist, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Lu1d...

Is there a pause in global warming?

This question was posed to Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Josh Willis as part of NASA's Ask A Climate Scientist campaign.

Josh gets asked a lot if there has been a pause in global warming, because temperatures aren't increasing as fast as they were a decade ago. No, he says, global warming is definitely still increasing (http://climate.nasa.gov/key_indicator...). We see more heat being trapped in the oceans, and sea levels are rising. Look at the sea level record for the last decade (http://climate.nasa.gov/key_indicator...). It's going up like gangbusters, hasn't slowed down.

There's not really a pause in global warming. Sometimes there's natural fluctuations and we warm up a little faster in one decade and a little slower in another decade, but global warming, human-caused climate change? Josh says, "that's definitely going right on up in there. We haven't slowed down at all."

See more of NASA's answers to your questions on climate science (http://bit.ly/1b7rSdL).

This video uses animation, graphics, and video clips to illustrate and explain each of the "flow" and "storage" processes in the Hydrologic Cycle, more commonly known as the Water Cycle: precipitation, interception, runoff, infiltration, percolation, groundwater discharge, evaporation, transpiration, evapotranspiration, and condensation.

Published on Jul 12, 2013

Physicist Lee Smolin talks about how the scientific community works: as he puts it, "we fight and argue as hard as we can," but everyone accepts that the next generation of scientists will decide who's right. And, he says, that's how democracy works, too. More of his lectures on his Website here.