Disney Educational - Bill Nye The Science Guy - Atmosphere
Bill Nye always makes science exciting. Using a combination of silliness, music video parodies, and other devices that kids can relate to, he delivers a healthy dose of scientific information with each episode. In Bill Nye the Science Guy: Atmosphere, Nye looks at the importance of the atmosphere, and compares the Earth to an apple, with the atmosphere being the skin.
It protects us from meteoroids and ultraviolet rays, and provides us with the air we breathe. In Earth’s Atmosphere, students will learn about the layers of our atmosphere and why each is important to the survival of life on our planet. They’ll also discover why the atmosphere is responsible for weather and see how special aircraft actually fly into the severest weather of all-hurricanes! Atmospheric pressure is covered and students will even build their own working barometer in a fun Junior (4-6), Intermediate Grades (7-8) (JI)
Without the crucial resources of water and atmosphere, life would not be possible on Earth. Because of this, it is critical that they be managed and cared for. Water and Atmosphere focuses on issues that affect us now, and will affect us even more in the future.
Earth's atmosphere supports and protects all of its life, giving the planet its blue skies, mild temperatures, and weather. But people use the atmosphere for another purpose: as a dump for waste gases and particles. Air pollution obscures vistas, damages ecosystems, and compromises human health. Combined with water in the atmosphere, air pollutants create acid rain. In the upper atmosphere, air pollutants damage the ozone layer, which protects life from the sun's harmful rays. Excess emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane push global temperatures higher, creating global warming. While some pollutants are successfully regulated, as population grows and industries expand, more intensive solutions are needed to deal with the many types of air pollution and its consequences. This provocative book tackles these issues in a straightforward manner and shows readers what they can do to help conserve our planet's atmosphere.
Aside from the first four chapters (which provide an excellent, if strident, history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), this is a thorough text book on climate analysis for the layman. It develops a cogent theory of how the atmosphere works and explains each of the issues involved from the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, the tilt of the poles, the impact of the solar cycle, to a detailed look at the defects in climate modeling and how one might expect the atmosphere to react if, indeed, the earth were warming or cooling. Great care is taken to explain the impact of each of the green house gases (including the most significant, water vapor, and how its omission from IPCC studies impacts the conclusions). Not light reading, but well worth the effort.
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