Bridget Heos’s enthusiastic, creative voice in It’s Getting Hot in Here: The Past, Present and Future of Climate Change is inspiring.  This is not your typical piece of non-fiction for student research.  Heo’s passion for the who, what, when, how and why is evident throughout.  Students will walk away knowing the science in how climate changes have happened historically, not just warming but the times of cooling and freezing as well and how the two have interplayed.  They will be taught how nature is constantly changing its climate and that we are actually just making it happen exponentially faster.  Of course, she gives the standard ways to help stop climate change and the most recent research behind this, but students will learn how the little things we do without thinking also add to the big picture, such as how tilling the soil to plant a new crop is releasing naturally produced underground methane gasses or how our expectation of readily available food sources has a direct impact on climate in terms of mass breeding of animals and the amount of waste they produce, let alone all of the steps to get that animal fed and on our table for dinner.   Every chapter ends with a “Be the Change” segment with real life ideas that we can do to help slow down global warming.  Additionally, this is a gorgeously printed book.  While closer to the size of hardback novels, it is the vivid pictures are used as examples and  every 15 pages or so as wallpaper, making the book visually stimulating.  But the best part of this addition to all of the literature out there on climate change is Heos’s voice.  She is enthusiastic and clever in every aspect of her writing.  In talking about the Big Bang and how the Earth began evolving, she explains how bacteria in the ocean first started photosynthesizing light and releasing oxygen about 2.4 billion years ago.  But oxygen was poisonous to bacteria not in the ocean.  Heos writes a little typed note stating:

Dear Oxygen,

Thanks for destroying the world.  We’re going to go live in a hole now.

Love, Bacteria.

That flash of wit shows up many, many other times and keeps the tone educationally fun.  For all of these reasons, I would highly recommend this book.