In this presentation I address Climate Change, the most significant challenge to achieving sustainable development. First, I start with the main indicators of climate change. Next, I will look at climate extremes and their impacts. And finally, I’ll wrap up this presentation by looking at how climate change would be a threat to sustainable development. As you are all aware, Climate change is broad issue. It includes majority of the sciences and engineering disciplines. No matter what we’re passionate about, something we care about will be affected by climate change. We are facing the biggest environment challenge our generation has ever seen. The climate system, is an interactive system consisting of five major components: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the land surface and the biosphere, forced or influenced by various external forcing mechanisms, the most important of which is the Sun. Also the direct effect of human activities on the climate system is considered an external forcing. Many physical, chemical and biological interaction processes occur among the various components of the climate system on a wide range of space and time scales, making the system extremely complex. Although the components of the climate system are very different in their composition, physical and chemical properties, structure and behavior, they are all linked by fluxes of mass, heat and momentum: all subsystems are open and interrelated.

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