What is climate change? Rising global temperatures (global warming) affect the Earth’s climate systems, by worsening and increasing the frequency of extreme weather events like droughts, floodings, and hurricanes, causing sea levels to rise, altering its seasons (drier and longer summers, warmer and shorter winters), ice caps and glaciers to melt, and ultimately species to go extinct and ecosystems we depend on to collapse. All these changes caused by global warming put together are often simply referred to as ‘climate change’.