Reputation is kind of like how much the climatedeal.org community trusts you. There is no mechanism in the software for administrators or moderators to "give" anyone reputation. Reputation is earned by convincing other users that you know what you're talking about.

It works like this: Let's say you ask a good question, or provide a helpful answer. Other people will vote it up: you earn 10 reputation. If someone asks an off-topic question or posts an incorrect or unhelpful answer, other people vote them down: lose 2 reputation. Reputation earning is capped at 200 per day (having one of your answers chosen as the accepted answer is immune to this cap).

As you collect reputation, climatedeal.org gives you more tools to help build the content on this site:

15 Vote up
15 Flag offensive
15 Add an image to a question
15 Add more than one link (URL) to a post
50 Leave comments
100 Vote down (costs 1 reputation)
100 Edit community wiki questions
100 Ask questions faster than every 20 minutes
100 Answer questions faster than every 2 minutes
250 Vote to close or reopen your questions
250 Create new tags
500 Retag questions
2000 Edit other people's questions and answers
3000 Vote to close or reopen any questions
10,000 Delete closed questions, access to moderation tools