Climate Change

Sandy Campbell is a reference librarian in the Science and Technology Library at the University of Alberta.

Groundwork Guides is a series that tackles difficult and complex issues.
On Being Muslim and Pornography are two other titles in this series.

Shelley Tanaka has taken information from various sources, including
academic research, synthesized it, translated it into an easily readable
form, and packaged it for young-adult readers. This volume focuses on
the most shocking information about global warming and climate change.
It is designed to present as starkly as possible the fact that the world
is changing and that we need to care.

Tanaka begins with the fact that politicians have finally accepted that
human activity has contributed to climate change, then describes how we
got to this point, including a review of climatic systems. She looks at
the potential impacts of rising sea levels resulting from melting polar
caps. And she lays out some of the difficult choices that we will have
to make.

Whenever academic research is simplified for a consumer market, there
is always the danger of oversimplification and overgeneralization. This
volume may be guilty of a lack of balance; however, the situation,
particularly in the Arctic, is even more dire and more shocking than
this book portrays. We need more books of this sort to inform readers
about the gravity of climate change.

Many students will be researching climate change over the coming years.
This book gives them a good starting point. Highly recommended.