About The Cover Shot: Erosion along Cape Hatteras North Carolina has been about 12 feet per year in recent years, leaving house after house stranded in the surf, awaiting its destruction. This is due to a combination of rising sea level and stronger storms and hurricanes, effects of increasing warmth in the atmosphere and ocean. Federal insurance guarantees money for rebuilding, and local officials continue to bulldoze sand back onto beaches -- both of which actions actually increase erosion damage, according to scientists.

The world is catching up to Gary Braasch. "This was not a very well covered issue when I started six years ago," he says. The issue is global warming, and what Gary started was an ongoing project to document the results of climate change.

Gary Braasch is an environmental photographer and writer. He covers natural history and conservation issues for magazines worldwide. In recent years photographs and articles of his appeared in Time, LIFE, Discover, Nature, Science, Audubon, National Wildlife, Smithsonian, Natural History, Animals, French Terre Sauvage, Outdoor Photographer, Photo District News and the Swiss Animan magazine. He is a winner of the Ansel Adams award for conservation photography and a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers.

Braasch exhibited a 30 print show on climate change entitled Polar Thaw at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Field Museum in Chicago and many universities. The United Nations published his photographs as calendars, in magazines, and a set of international stamps about global warming.

He researched and photographed areas of high biodiversity in North and South America, and is currently in the midst of a worldwide documentation of the effects of climate change. His latest books are Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World and How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate (for kids, written with Lynne Cherry).