The Everywhere Atom: A Journey Through the Carbon Cycle and Climate Change

Journey with the carbon atom through a history of Earth's wild climate, from dinosaurs to wooly mammoths to today's climate crisis.

The Everywhere Atom blends facts, humor, cartoons, and simple narration to explain how the carbon cycle affects the climate, now and throughout Earth's history. The carbon cycle is often missing from children's climate books, yet it is fundamental to laying the conceptual groundwork for understanding climate science.

This engaging guide uses creatures that kids love, like dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, as an entry point for understanding climate science and the climate crisis. The book ends with a message of hope: only broad-scale social change and collective action can possibly address the scale of the climate crisis.

Balancing the heaviness of the climate crisis with dynamic illustrations and humor, the book's cartoon carbon atoms are designed to not only engage younger audiences and bring some comic relief to the subject, but also drive home a central point: carbon is not bad per se, it's how humans affect the movement of carbon that can make it so powerful and damaging--which also means the climate crisis can be reversed.