With today's award of the Nobel Prize to Al Gore and the International Panel on Climate Change, more people than ever will be asking what climate change is and how it could affect them.

Here in California, we will see temperatures rise in some places and fall in others. Rain and snow patterns will change, possibly disrupting the water supplies that our communities depend on. The food we raise and gardens we enjoy could be affected, too. And of course, we already are seeing big technological shifts in our cars and other vehicles.

UC Davis faculty, staff and students have active research, teaching and public-service programs in many aspects of climate change.

You can see summaries of those programs, presented in an easy-to-understand Q&A fashion for general audiences, at a new Web site created by the John Muir Institute of the Environment at UC Davis.

Titled "Climate Change: Science Supporting Policy in California and Beyond," the presentation spans a variety of areas of impact, including:

• Air quality
• Agriculture
• Water resources
• Oceans
• Ecological forecasting
• Solutions and human adaptation
• Clean technology and energy
• Ancient climate change
• Forecasting and modeling

For more information, go to: http://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/.