It's Here! What Is Climate Change? by Gail Herman

A skinny polar bear doesn't look much like a little yellow bird, but the huge white polar bear is the canary in the coal mine in the matter of climate change. Since 2016, the waters of Hudson's Bay have not frozen in November as they have always done. Starving polar bears who depend on sea ice to support their diet of seal have become common since then. There's no doubt that a warming planet has warmer oceans, lakes, and rivers, which threaten all living things on Earth in some way.

Gail Herman's slender non-fiction book, What Is Climate Change? (What Was?) (Penguin Workshop) tells it like it is for middle elementary and middle school readers. The author explains the difference between weather and climate, and describes how temperatures and rainfall have been collected by scientists over time, especially since 1880, when international temperature readings began to be collected all over the world, showing a rise in world temperatures of of three degrees Celsius or 5 degrees Fahrenheit over that time.

"Nearly all-97 percent--of climate scientist agree: Humans, and their impact on the Earth, are making a difference. We are just realizing the scale and permanence of the change."

"Recent human activity is he reason why Earth is warming and also wbhy it's happening at such a rapid rate. Some feel we should even mark this as a new era, much like the Age of the Diniosaurs: The Age of Humans."

In short, pithy chapters Herman covers how climate has varied wildly throughout earth's history, and how since the Industrial Revolution greenhouse gases from burning wood and fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas have formed a layer in which such heat cannot escape the earth's atmosphere. She also points out how deforestration has led to loss of the natural cooling ability of vegetation from human activities, leading to a "vicious cycle" of more and more heating of soil, air, and water, causing ever more dangerous heat waves and extreme weather events, famines and fire events, and storms and ocean rise that threatens islands and coastal areas throughout the world.

Herman also recounts the names and work of scientists and world leaders who have worked rather heroically to bring an understanding of the seriousness of the global problem and to try to slow down the dire results of continued global warming. The skinny polar bear adrift on the melting ice floe is a poignant symbol of mankind in the face of the climate change we all are creating. With much information presented with clarity and detail and an appendix with a Timeline of Climate Change which begins in the U.S. with the first factory in Rhode Island in 1790 to Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2017, A World Event Timeline, and a Bibliography with books and websites, this succinct illustrated overview of climate change offers considerable information to students in Grades 3-8.

There'll Be A Hot Time in the Old Town....: It's Getting HOT in Here: The Past, the Present, and Future of Climate Change by Bridget Heos

People often say that in a perfect world, this or that would happen. Nice guys would finish first.

But our world already is pretty perfect. It has to be in order for life to exist. Even simple life forms have yet to be found on other planets. But here on earth, conditions have allowed complex plants and animals to evolve.

For humans to have populated the world and built civilizations that provide food, water, health care, and education, things had to be just right.

Primary among those things necessary for abundant life is the greenhouse effect. Too little carbon dioxide and methane in the upper atmosphere and the earth is an icy snowball. Too much of a good thing and.... well, it's not a pretty picture, as Bridget Heo's forthcoming It's Getting Hot in Here: The Past, Present, and Future of Climate Change (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) points out. Like that iconic polar bear marooned on a tiny ice floe on the cover, the results of the continuous rise of average global temperature is certain to leave a super-storm-battered mankind high and probably dry on shrunken continents amid a rising sea level of increasingly salty water, with fresh water sources evaporating in the rising heat. 2015 was the hottest year since humans have kept records. Most of the ten or twenty hottest years have been in the twenty-first century. What must we do to turn down the heat?

Heos' It's Getting Hot in Here is a succinct summary of the basics students need to know about climate change, a easy-to-understand compendium of theories, facts and figures, and ideas about what to do, recounting the history of our awareness of changes in climate going back before NASA's James Hansen issued his first warnings. The author explains the role of greenhouse gases in the "Land Before Time," within the perspective of earth's history over billions of years, the ups and downs of those gases over millions of years, but concentrates on the years since the mid-twentieth century when the advance in physical sciences enabled us to analyze variations of carbon dioxide in ice core samples from glaciers and sample the greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere. The graphs are stunning in their clarity. After changing little for many centuries, the rate goes straight up from the late 1700s and continues its rise to the present, perfectly showing the rise in the burning of carbon-dioxide-releasing fossil fuels.

Bridge Heos' solid, science-based text is not guilty of scare-mongering. She straightforwardly describes the changes in polar ice, glaciers, and the rise in the oceans which has small South Pacific island nations already brokering a move of their entire populations to Australia and Asia. Tovalu, Tonga, Kiribati, Fiji, Samoa, and the Maldives, only a few feet above sea level, are likely going under in the lifetimes of this book's readers. And lest we feel too smug up on our big continent, let's remember that New Orleans is already below sea level (Remember Hurricane Katrina?), and Galveston, Miami and Palm Beach, New York, Charleston, and downtown Boston are no more than three feet above ocean level. With extreme tropical storms like Super-Storm Sandy likely, that's not going to be enough for those areas to survive this century either.

Author Heos traces the genesis of human efforts to slow the rise of greenhouse gases through the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord (this book was already in production during the 2015 Paris agreement), and optimistically takes the position that humans have the ingenuity and much of the technological knowledge and enterprise to slow global warming to more manageable levels while we are switching to non-fossil sources of energy.  She establishes the case that the evidence is clear that we must have the will.

With a glossary, a bibliography of books, primary sources, and articles, and the necessary index, this book is quite accessible as an invaluable source for secondary students as supplementary reading for environmental science classes and is a necessary purchase for middle, high school, and public libraries. "Well-researched and comprehensible, it’s an alarming, but never alarmist, examination of a critical topic," says Publishers Weekly's starred review.