The White House unveiled a new climate change visualization website Wednesday.

The idea is to help people understand the science behind climate change and encourage them to imagine how it will affect their own lives by showing a graphic representation of how one's city, town, or backyard might be impacted by rising sea levels, flooding, heat waves, drought, or polar vortexes.

The website is the idea of John D. Podesta, a counselor to President Obama tasked with building public support for the administration's climate change agenda.

The Obama administration hopes viewing these computer models will help people prepare for climate change by better understanding the sort of risks they may face.

The visualization app is part of a larger effort to get America ready for the impact of our changing environment. In a press release Wednesday, Podesta announced the roll out of the Climate Data Initiative, "an ambitious new effort bringing together extensive open government data and design competitions with commitments from the private and philanthropic sectors to develop data-driven planning and resilience tools for local communities."

So what is the Climate Data Initiative?

"By taking the enormous data sets regularly collected by NASA, NOAA, and other agencies and applying the ingenuity, creativity, and expertise of technologists and entrepreneurs, the Climate Data Initiative will help create easy-to-use tools for regional planners, farmers, hospitals, and businesses across the country -- and empower America's communities to prepare themselves for the future."

The idea is that local governments, businesses, and individuals will be more prepared to deal with climate change in the near future if they can start imagining its effects and anticipating responses now.

The White House's unveiling of the Climate Data Initiative and the new visualization website come in the same week the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) released a report urging the country to prepare for climate change and encouraging officials and scientists to collaborate in finding solutions to the challenges it will bring.

Podesta's release ends by reminding, "every citizen will be affected by climate change -- and all of us must work together to make our communities stronger and more resilient to its impacts."

IPCC chief: Worst can be avoided with action now
Yokohama, Japan (AFP) March 26, 2014 - The United Nation's head of climate change issues stressed Wednesday that the earth's warming trend, almost certainly caused by people, can still be eased.

Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told a small group of journalists that societies have to decide whether to take a path to deterioration or to make moves that will conserve the planet.

"Yes, of course it is difficult," he said on the sidelines of an IPCC gathering, being held this week in Japan for the first time.

"But what is going to be even more difficult, substantially more difficult, is to deal with alternatives."

"In other words, if we don't stabilise the climate of this planet, then these impacts are going to be progressively more serious," he said.

Some 550 scientists and officials from around the world are meeting behind closed doors this week to hammer out a 29-page summary of a massive report, which is expected to detail impacts and ways to reduce risks associated with climate change.

The report will serve as the second volume in the long-awaited Fifth Assessment Report, which is likely to shape policies and climate talks for years to come.

Global warming has resulted in reduced yields of wheat, rice and corn, increasing food security risks as the world's population expands, a draft of the summary says.

The draft, seen by AFP, also spells out the possibility of increased floods, drought, conflict and economic damage if carbon emissions continue unchecked.

"This report has a substantial amount of recent data, looking at the impacts on human health, the impacts on urban as well as rural systems," Pachauri said.

"The cost of inaction is going to be substantially higher and certainly make life much more difficult than the difficulty of taking actions," he said.

The final summary, to be released on Monday, should help improve understanding among decision-makers about the urgent need to take action against, he said.

Pachauri shrugged off suggestions that election cycles push politicians to focus on short-term steps linked to local economies, rather than long-term measures.

"If you inform the public and if you tell them about scientific reality of climate change, I am sure in democracy... you will see action based on knowledge based on informed scientific assessment."

He urged the public not to confuse weather patterns and climate change, as recent winter chills in North America have prompted many to joke about global warming and have fuelled scepticism.

Extreme heat waves and precipitation are on the rise as climate change progresses, bringing heavy rain and snow falls in "upper latitude" regions during winter, Pachauri added.

"The belief that there has been slowing down of warming is really misplaced," he said.

"Yes there has been a lot of extreme events. Heavy snow falls in the US and so on. But we need to distinguish changes in the weather from changes in climate," he said.

Pachauri called for robust policy action now as inertia in the global climate system will continue to heat the earth for "several decades", even if humans began to reduce emissions now.

"Clearly, it's going to be progressively difficult, and it's going to be essential that we start taking the right steps today," he said. "The sooner the better."