The Everywhere Atom

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

The Everywhere Atom blends science, humour, and cartoon atoms to explain how the carbon cycle affects the climate, today and throughout Earth's history. The carbon atom is the most basic building block on Earth and its movement around the planet shapes the climate. While the carbon cycle is central to understanding climate change, it is often missing from children’s climate books, making this a critical addition to classrooms and libraries.

This engaging guide uses creatures that kids love, like dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, as an entry point for understanding the carbon cycle. Kids will journey from Earth’s early fiery days to Ice Ages to the modern fossil fuel era. While addressing the climate crisis, the book ends with a message of hope: humans are powerful in numbers and, through collective action, can affect the whole world, just like the carbon atom.

Balancing the heaviness of the climate crisis with dynamic illustrations and humor, the book’s cartoon carbon atoms are designed to engage younger audiences (readers from ages 5-9) and bring some comic relief to the subject, driving home a central point: carbon is not bad per se, it is how humans affect the movement of carbon that can make it so powerful and damaging — which also means the climate crisis can be reversed.

Christine Shearer, PhD, is a Research Manager at the Climate Imperative Foundation, where she analyzes initiatives and identifies policies that most effectively meet energy and climate goals. Christine previously worked as a program director for Global Energy Monitor, tracking and analyzing global energy systems and their climate impacts. She also worked as a postdoctoral scholar in Earth System Science at the University of California in Irvine and was a research fellow at Project Drawdown and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Her peer-reviewed research has appeared in publications such as AGU Advances and Earth’s Future, and she is author of Kivalina: A Climate Change Story (Haymarket Books, 2011).Kaz Clarke is an artist, illustrator, and graphic designer based in Australia whose previous work includes The Whimsical Wisdom of Phoebe. She has also illustrated other children’s books such as Skadoodle & Snug’s Magnificent Plan.

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