Ecology and Climate:How the Living Planet Works and What Changes Its Climate

Ecology and Climate:How the Living Planet Works and What Changes Its ClimateCourse-Research

Vita Harwood

Series "In Twelve Evenings" BOOK 12

What Do I Already Know About This?

Test your knowledge!

12 lessons; tests; 120 explained answers; glossary; resources; further reading and viewing

What happens when you stop treating ecology as a list of environmental rules and start seeing the planet as a connected system?

Ecology and Climate: How the Living Planet Works and What Changes Its Climate is a twelve-lesson short course for readers aged fifteen and up who want a clear, evidence-based introduction without a school-textbook tone. It begins with a single organism and its relationships, then follows food webs, energy flow, water and nutrient cycles, carbon, biodiversity, and the machinery of climate. From there, the book asks harder questions: Why did Earth's climate change long before humans? How do scientists know what is changing now and why? What happens when ecosystems cannot adjust fast enough? Can technology solve environmental problems, or can it simply move them elsewhere?

Each lesson is built around a question rather than a chapter heading to memorize. Scientific ideas are introduced when they become useful, with portraits of researchers, surprising verified facts, key terms, a ten-question test, and a home or field assignment.

A single observation project, the Map of a Living System, runs through the entire course and teaches readers to notice stocks, flows, feedbacks, boundaries, risks, and trade-offs in the world around them.

The result is a compact guide to ecology and climate science that replaces slogans with mechanisms. Readers finish with a connected picture of ecosystems, the carbon cycle, biodiversity, climate evidence, environmental risk, mitigation, adaptation, technology, and sustainability, plus 120 explained test answers, a glossary, resources, and suggestions for what to read and watch next.