Climate Toolkit: A Resource Manual for Science and Action

Reviewed by Jamie Trammell, Associate Professor, Southern Oregon University on 1/13/21

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The Climate Toolkit is a much needed, hands-on approach to understand past, current, and future climate dynamics and interactions. The book is incredibly comprehensive, covering most of the major components of the climate system, but showcasing hands-on examples across the board. The table of contents makes it easy to find relevant topics and the accompanying exercises.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

With ample links to outside sources, this is a very accurate and unbiased example of how to explore these topics on your own.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

This book focuses more on the processes, even when it comes to the mitigation and adaptation sections, making it super relevant now and well into the future. Given that every exercise relies upon an external website, updates will certainly be needed to maintain all of the rich content. However, all links have worked so far!

Clarity rating: 5

There is no excessive jargon used in this at all. I refer to it as our "plain-language" resource, as it gets to the point very quickly, and then allows students to explore on their own the data behind the concepts.

Consistency rating: 5

This text is highly consistent from one section to another, and the questions at the end are written consistently (i.e. they build in complexity from Activity A - D) throughout the sections.

Modularity rating: 5

Given the focus on activities, each section is highly modular. There is not a lot of text in any section, as the focus is interacting with data and visualizations, meaning readers can easily hop from one section to another.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

I found this text to be organized very close to other climate texts; it starts with a focus on the basic principles, then moves into current and future impacts, and finally into mitigation and adaptation exercises.

Interface rating: 4

PDF has large white space gaps and some of the images/figures were cut off. But, the web-version is very well designed. Weblinks work very well from both. I really appreciate the appendices at the end, but found myself wanting some of the "further resources" to be referenced in each of the sections.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I have not found any noticeable spelling or grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

This text certainly showcases primarily US examples (especially Oregon), but I was heartened to see one of the exercises focusing in on the Quinault Indian Nation. More examples from other regions of the world (like that in Section 7) would certainly help others localize these concepts. But, given that most resources are globally available, it is not hard to cater the exercises to a different region. Some website require really fast internet to work, so there could be some accessibility challenges for communities without reliable internet access.

Comments

The Climate Toolbox is an excellent resource for undergraduate-level assignments/exercises that explore the components of our climate, the reality of our past, current and future climate, and what to do about it all. Thank you to the author for curating the equivalent of a GIS exercises book for climatology.