Ivy and Bean: What's the Big Idea? (10 page)

But they didn't. They stood looking at her and Ivy.

“Wait,” said a mom. “How was that about global warming?”

Ivy and Bean glanced at each other. Even in the dim light, Bean could see that the grown-ups were confused. “Were you happy?” asked Bean.

“What?” said the mom.

“Were you happy while you were lying down?” asked Bean.

“Well, yes,” said the mom. “Sure. It was great.”

“That's it,” said Ivy. “We wanted you all to feel happy in nature.”

“So you would care about global warming,” explained Bean.

There was a little pause. Bean and Ivy looked at each other—what was so hard to
understand?—and then the mom said, “Oh. I get it.”

The other grown-ups smiled. “That's a good one,” said a dad. “That's a really good one.” The other grown-ups yawned and nodded. They began to drift back to the cafeteria, except for Ivy and Bean's parents.

Ivy's mom took Ivy's hand. “I was happy,” she said.

“Really? You weren't worried about poison oak and bugs?” Ivy asked.

“At first, I was, a little bit. But then I did what you said, Bean, and smelled the grass and listened to the trees. I haven't done that in a long time.”

“And now you care about global warming?” Ivy asked.

“Sure I do.”

Ivy turned to Bean. “It worked!”

Bean elbowed Ivy. “Of course it worked. It couldn't help working. It's science.”

As they walked back to the cafeteria to give Ms. Aruba-Tate her watch, Bean's dad put his arm around her shoulder. “That was a great science project, sweetie. Much better than my poster idea.”

Bean gave him a squeeze. “Oh, Dad, don't feel bad. You're a grown-up. You can't help it.”

Ivy and Bean let the grown-ups walk ahead. “They're all caring about global warming now,” said Ivy. “I can tell.”

“We should give classes,” said Bean.

“It would have been nice if we had found the one big solution to global warming,” said Ivy.

“Yeah,” said Bean. “But we had lots of good small ideas.”

“And we're only beginners,” said Ivy. “If the two of us work on global warming for ten more years, I bet we find the solution.”

Once again, Bean pictured herself holding up a test tube full of shimmering pink stuff while white-coated scientists gasped in amazement. “The first thing we need to do,” said Bean, “is to get our hands on a really dangerous chemistry set.”

The End.

And Other Ideas about Global Warming

What is global warming, anyway?
Everyone likes to be cozy and warm, but too warm is bad. Too warm is sweaty and gross. You all know that people and cars and factories have put a lot of pollution in the air. There's a thick layer of pollution way up in the sky. It isn't so thick that the sun's warmth can't get down to the earth, but it is so thick that the heat can't bounce off the earth and return to outer space where it started. That's what's supposed to happen, but it can't. The heat is trapped down here, in our atmosphere (otherwise known as the sky surrounding our planet). Because of this, the planet is getting hotter and hotter. People may not notice it while they're walking around, going to school, playing soccer, and eating breakfast, but it's happening.

You would really notice it if you were in the North Pole, where the ice is melting,
which is bad news for creatures that live on the ice, like polar bears. You would also notice it if you were a frog who wanted to live in a stream that had dried up, or a bird who wanted to build a nest in a redwood tree that couldn't grow without plenty of nice cold fog.

Global warming is bad for animals and plants, for sure. It's also bad for us, because really, who wants to live in a world without frogs? Not me. And even if you think you could manage to live without frogs, you have to think about what frogs do. Among other things, they eat mosquitoes. So, no frogs equals many more mosquitoes. Scratch, scratch, scratch. And that's just one example.

So how can this problem be fixed?
Some people are trying to figure out ways to let the heat out of our atmosphere.
Some are trying to clean up the pollution that's floating around up there. Some are trying to make cars and factories that pollute less in the first place. It's hard, though. It's hard because almost every solution involves people giving something up. Take recycling, for instance. Recycling is good for the earth because if you can reuse stuff, it doesn't have to be made all over again, which means less factory pollution. Cool. But recycling also means you have to get up off your duff and find the right recycling bin, and sometimes you have pick your old disgusting hot dog wrapper out of the garbage can and put it in the recycling bin. Still, in comparison to no polar bears or frogs, it doesn't seem like much to complain about.

But recycling is just one tiny example of a solution.
What are some others?

Let's look at some of the ideas Ms. Aruba-Tate's students had.

1. Why can't we just throw ice cubes in the air?
As much as I hate to admit it, Nancy is right about this one. The sun is stronger than all the ice cubes we could make on Earth AND the energy it takes to make all those ice cubes causes pollution. Darn.

2. Why can't we plant a whole bunch of trees that will eat up all the pollution?
We can and we are. Areas where trees got chopped down a hundred years ago are being replanted with new trees. The problem is that we can't plant enough trees to eat up all the pollution because we don't have enough space.

3. Why can't everyone stop breathing so much?
It's true that people breathe out carbon dioxide, which is one of the gases that's holding the heat in our atmosphere. But breathing makes so little carbon dioxide compared to, say, driving a car, that holding your breath won't make that much difference. It's probably not good for you, either.

4. Why can't cars run on limes instead of gasoline?
They can, but it would take so many limes that we'd have to rip out all the trees we've got and replace them with lime trees in order to get enough to fuel just a couple hundred cars. What we need is “clean energy,” which means fuel that doesn't pollute, and is easy to find or make. There's got to be a great clean fuel out there somewhere. It's probably something that's
lying around all over the place, something no one has realized could be used for fuel. What could it be? Earwax?

5. Why can't we get energy by breaking stuff into bits?
We can. It's called nuclear fission, and the person who thought of it was Lise Meitner (Ivy calls her “Lisa Something”). The stuff you break has to be tinier than rice, though. You have to break the centers of atoms, which are almost the tiniest things on the planet, but very strong. When you pull them apart, they release a whole lot of energy. This is great, because energy is what we need, except that breaking them apart requires an enormous machine that's really expensive. Also, it causes a lot of another kind of pollution that's dangerous to plants and animals.

6. Why can't we vacuum up all the heat and send it out into space?
Scientists are working to make artificial trees that suck carbon dioxide out of the air, which is kind of like a vacuum cleaner. A real vacuum cleaner–type machine wouldn't work because the heat is inside the earth and the oceans, and how is a vacuum cleaner going to slurp heat out of an ocean? Also, because rockets use lots of fuel, the amount of heat caused by sending the vacuum cleaner bag into space would add back all the heat you had just subtracted.

7. Why can't we put up mirrors to reflect the sun's rays back before they get trapped under our pollution?
It's a good idea, and scientists are working on it. Some scientists are thinking
about putting giant mirrors in the desert, but that would be really expensive because the mirrors would have to be enormous. Some are thinking about putting a bunch of tiny mirrors in outer space, but there's that blasting-off problem again.

SO WHAT CAN WE DO?

There is probably not one thing that will fix global warming (unless I'm right about earwax), but if everyone works at it to the best of his or her ability, we might be able to have a world we all want to live in.

Special thanks to Sean Fottrell for information about the science of global warming.

Text © 2010 by Annie Barrows.
Illustrations © 2010 by Sophie Blackall.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barrows, Annie.
Ivy + Bean what's the big idea? / written by Annie Barrows ; illustrated by Sophie Blackall.
p. cm. — (Ivy + Bean ; bk. 7)
Summary: When all the second grade students must enter the science fair, which has global warming as its theme, best friends Ivy and Bean team up to create an unusual project. eISBN 978-0-8118-7976-7
[1. Science projects—Fiction. 2. Science fairs—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction.] I. Blackall, Sophie, ill. II. Title. III. Title: Ivy and Bean what's the big idea? IV. Series.
PZ7.B27576Iwbh 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2010008258

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