The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. “Hope Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a...
The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. “Hope Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a...
Due to publisher restrictions, your digital library cannot purchase additional copies of this title. We apologize if there is a long holds list. You may want to see if other editions of this title are available from your digital library instead.
Due to publisher restrictions, your digital library cannot purchase additional copies of this title. We apologize if there is a long holds list. You may want to see if other editions of this title are available from your digital library instead.
Description-
The essential pocket primer on climate change that will leave an indelible impact on everyone who reads it. “Hope Jahren asks the central question of our time: how can we learn to live on a finite planet?" (Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction). “Hope Jahren is the voice that science has been waiting for.” —Nature Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist, a brilliant writer, a passionate teacher, and one of the seven billion people with whom we share this earth. In The Story of More, she illuminates the link between human habits and our imperiled planet. In concise, highly readable chapters, she takes us through the science behind the key inventions—from electric power to large-scale farming to automobiles—that, even as they help us, release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere like never before. She explains the current and projected consequences of global warming—from superstorms to rising sea levels—and the actions that we all can take to fight back. At once an explainer on the mechanisms of global change and a lively, personal narrative given to us in Jahren’s inimitable voice, The Story of More is “a superb account of the deadly struggle between humanity and what may prove the only life-bearing planet within ten light years" (E. O. Wilson).
Excerpts-
From the book
1
Our Story Begins The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that. —Thomas Edison to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931)
Important men have been arguing about global change since before I was born.
Almost ninety years ago, the guy who invented the light bulb urged renewable energy on the guy who invented the car and the guy who invented the tire. I imagine they nodded politely, finished their drinks, and went straight back to motorizing the planet. During the decades that followed, the Ford Motor Company manufactured and sold more than three hundred million motor vehicles that burned upward of ten billion barrels of oil and required a minimum of 1.2 billion tires, also partially made from oil.
But that’s not all. Back in 1969, the Norwegian explorer Bernt Balchen noticed a thinning trend in the ice that covered the North Pole. He warned his colleagues that the Arctic Ocean was melting into an open sea and that this could change weather patterns such that farming would become impossible in North America ten to twenty years hence. The New York Times picked up the story, and Balchen was promptly shouted down by Walter Whittmann of the U.S. Navy, who had seen no evidence of thinning during his monthly airplane flights over the pole.
As is the case with most scientists most of the time, Balchen was both right and wrong in his claims. By 1999, the submarines that had been cruising the Arctic Ocean since the 1950s could clearly see that polar sea ice had thinned drastically during the twentieth century—thinned by almost half. Nevertheless, it’s been fifty years since Balchen graced the pages of the Times and American agriculture has yet to feel the full effect of any melting. Which, technically, means that Whittmann was also both wrong and right.
We shouldn’t be surprised when scientists are wrong. All human beings are a lot better at describing what is happening than at predicting what will happen. Somewhere along the way, however, we began to hope that scientists were different—that they could be right all the time. And because they’re not, we kind of stopped listening. By now we’re quite practiced at not listening to things scientists say over and over again.
For example, giving up fossil fuels is not a new suggestion. Starting in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert who worked for Shell Oil started writing passionately about America’s need to embrace nuclear energy before our “inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels.” Hubbert believed that mining uranium from the bedrock of Colorado was more sustainable than burning oil and coal, which he reckoned would hit peak production by the years 2000 and 2150, respectively. He was both wrong and right.
Let’s go back to 1969 for a moment, back when Balchen was fighting with Whittmann and Hubbert was still on his soapbox. I don’t remember 1969 personally, but, like every year, it was full of beginnings and endings, problems and solutions, equal to any that had gone before or have come since.
Most of the trees you see out your window were barely seeds in 1969. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., was incorporated in 1969 and has since become the world’s largest private employer. Sesame Street premiered in 1969 and went on to teach millions of children how to count and spell. Big things started out as small things, then grew to change the world.
When the...
About the Author-
HOPE JAHREN is an award-winning scientist who has been pursuing independent research in paleobiology since 1996. Recognized by Time in 2016 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, she is the recipient of three Fulbright Awards and served as a tenured professor at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu from 2008 to 2016, where she built the isotope geobiology laboratories. She currently holds the J. Tuzo Wilson professorship at the University of Oslo, Norway.
Reviews-
February 1, 2020 Following a critically and popular debut, the lab girl turns teacher in a course on climate change. As most readers know, a bestseller gives a fledgling author a bigger megaphone. In her follow-up to Lab Girl (2016), Jahren (Geosciences/Univ. of Oslo) uses it to show how issues that are clearly important to her are crucial to all of humanity and the survival of the world as we know it. She doesn't use scare tactics or shrill warnings; unfortunately, "we kind of stopped listening. By now we're quite practiced at not listening to things scientists say over and over again." The author cites warnings about the dangers of fossil fuels dating to the 1950s and the linking of fossil fuels and the threat of global warming "as early as 1856." Few listened then, and now the crisis is urgent. In matter-of-fact detail and conversational prose, Jahren interweaves biographical information about her Midwestern girlhood and takes readers on a journey with her to her current home in Oslo, where she moved in 2016 "because I am worried about the future of science in America." She methodically takes us through discussions of food, especially regarding changes in production and consumption, and energy and the planet as a whole, emphasizing one central point: "What was only a faint drumbeat as I began to research this book now rings in my head like a mantra: Use Less and Share More." Over and over, the author shows how the world divides between those who consume and waste more and those who live on much less. She explores not only food scarcity, but also lack of electricity and sanitary water conditions. She clearly shows how the amount of waste created by the privileged could provide plenty for those less privileged. "The earth is sick," she writes, "and we suspect that it's something bad," and a cure begins with individual action but will require significant shifts in values and practices. A concise and personal yet universally applicable examination of a problem that affects everyone on planet Earth.
COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from March 1, 2020
Geobiologist Jahren (Univ. of Oslo, Norway; Lab Girl) shares material she gathered for a course on climate change in this fascinating, easy-to-understand read. With the earth's population burgeoning to seven billion, advances in agriculture and meat and fish production allow farmers to produce more food. However, these improved crops and animals necessitate the ever-growing use of pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics. Using a plethora of facts and figures, Jahren traces the history of fossil fuel formation and usage, carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, evidence of a warming world, and melting ice and rising sea levels, all leading to a possible sixth mass extinction. The pursuit of more, explains the author, especially from the Unites States, the UK, Japan, and Australia, causes residents of these countries to use a disproportionate amount of resources relative to their population size. Jahren concludes by asking readers to define their values and make changes to the way they live to help ameliorate continuing damage to the earth. Citations for statistics are included. VERDICT A well-researched if sobering introduction to the history and causes of climate change that should be read by all.--Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL
Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 1, 2020 Esteemed scientist Jahren follows her bestselling memoir, Lab Girl (2016), with a brief overview of human habits and inventions that led to the current climate crisis. In concise chapters patterned after a course she designed and taught on climate change, Jahren dips into such topics as population growth, agricultural methods, meat consumption, and humanity's overwhelming dependence (especially in the U.S.) on electricity. Peppering the text with pertinent statistics and pointing out the flaws in potential solutions, Jahren zips along at a devastating pace, making it clear that many bad choices have led us to the current planetary predicament. Occasionally sharing the sort of intimate insights that made her memoir such a hit, Jahren makes the point that climate change is personal for everyone. This is basically a lecture on broad and urgent scientific topics shaped into five-page chapters and addressing the causes of global warming, the rapidly escalating consequences, and what we can do to avert the worst. For readers who want a succinct and lucid primer on climate-change basics.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)
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How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
Hope Jahren
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The Story of More
How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
Hope Jahren
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