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

Written by Christine Shearer

Illustrated by Kaz Clarke

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, humor, 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.