NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, has effectively existed since 1807, when President Thomas Jefferson created the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, primarily for commercial purposes, and secondarily for defense (as the United States had only a tiny navy at that time). In 1870 the Weather Bureau was created, and in 1871 the Commission of Fish and Fisheries. The combined missions of coastal mapping, environmental science, and conservation were recast in 1970 as NOAA. So it's appropriate that NOAA's current mission has three elements: to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans and coasts; to share that knowledge and information with others; and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources.
As part of its explicit tasking to monitor climate, NOAA publishes a number of monthly reports addressing aspects of weather and climate, as well as weekly online updates. The National Weather Service is a division of NOAA, so basic atmospheric data from weather balloons and other traditional methods are combined with a fleet of 13 satellites for local plus synoptic views. Combining NOAA's and NASA's data collections produces an almost unbelievably large library of climate data, heavy on the last sixty years but spanning nearly two centuries.
NOAA owns a fleet of research ships which travel worldwide on a range of projects from seafloor and hydrothermal vent investigations to physical oceanography, deploying towed instruments or free-floating buoys to observe water properties, waves and currents. Not all projects on NOAA vessels are official NOAA projects, however: researchers sign up for and fund their own projects using the ships as their work platforms. So long as the projects are consistent with NOAA's mission, they are eligible for approval. In this way the NOAA fleet is involved in a huge range of scientific work, not all explicitly focused on climate change.
NOAA's (huge) website is one of the world's best repositories of raw data and well-written commentary on environmental conditions and trends. If you're curious to follow up on your own about earth's climate--even outside of global warming specifically--you can do much worse than to spend an hour or two browsing here:
This concludes part 1 of the Climate Awareness series. I have tried, in a loosely systematic way, to provide you with a general knowledge of earth and climate systems, and a basic vocabulary of scientific process. I might need in the months ahead to make a quick detour here and there to fill in some gaps (since I'm still doing this more or less by the seat of my pants, as I have things for much of my life...family members who are better planners than I am still shake their heads at me, I'm afraid). 
The NOAA satellite fleet. Larger version
Part 2 will be based mostly on the first volume of the IPCC's Assessment Report 6 (AR6), the Physical Science Basis. It came out, in draft form (so some parts are still fairly rough, with no illustrations) this last August, and was my inspiration for this whole series (along with the bite-sized format of Twitter). I hope that readers of this climate awareness series so far will have enough basic knowledge that I can use the report's own language and, by and large, not lose you. And that's important because it's a huge report, with a gigantic amount of information.
Our society and our world are at a crossroads. We face the onslaught of right-wing would-be autocrats in this and other countries. If they win, all hope of facing down the climate crisis is lost. If we win, the climate emergency will still remain. It's not unlike the passage from Tolkien's The Two Towers, as Gandalf talks to Theoden, king of the horseriding people of Rohan, about the coming battle: "If we fail, we fall. If we succeed...we will face the next task."
These are the challenges of our time. They're frightening and massive. Be brave, and be well.
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