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There’s no use avoiding it: our kids need to know about the global environmental crisis — climate change, deforestation, species extinction. And as long as we’re teaching them about all that, we may as well teach them some science at the same time. Learning about evaporation can be as boring as watching a pot boil, but if it’s part of a habitat-destroying, polar-bear-killing, actually-somewhat-interesting environmental disaster, maybe that’s something kids could enjoy reading.

Here are two new books that don’t shy away from the complexity of the science or the gravity of our environmental situation, but which also don’t forget their audience. Never before have so many serious ecological ideas been mixed so heavily with flatulence jokes and sad pictures of cute animals. The details of global warming boggle some of the world’s finest minds, but Laurie David and Cambria Gordon’s “Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming” actually makes it easy to understand.