The Story of More (Adapted for Young Adults): How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here

Product Description

This young adult adaptation of acclaimed geochemist and geobiologist Hope Jahren’s highly respected nonfiction work is the perfect book for those interested in learning about climate change and how they can contribute to creating a more sustainable future.

Hope Jahren, acclaimed geochemist and geobiologist, details the science behind key inventions, clarifying how electricity, large-scale farming, and automobiles have both helped and harmed our world.
 
Jahren explains the current and projected consequences of unchecked global warming, from superstorms to rising sea levels, resulting from the unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases being released into our atmosphere. The links between human consumption habits and our endangered existence are very real, with consequences leading to a crossroads of survival and extinction.
 
Still, Jahren maintains that our ever-broadening science-based knowledge can help us counter this dilemma. The eye-opening information provided in
The Story of More will help readers understand the path we must take. If we collectively make informed choices now, Jahren reassures us, our future can be as bright as we imagine it can be.

Review

Praise for THE STORY OF MORE (Adapted for Young Adults):
“This highly-readable scientific tome is a brief but thorough introduction into how we got here ecologically speaking and what is necessary to sustain our shared planet for future generations. It is strongly recommended for junior high and high school nonfiction collections.­”
—SLJ,
starred review

“. . . engaging and fresh. . . . this book should really resonate with young adults committed to changing the future.” —
Booklist, starred review

About the Author

Hope Jahren is an award-winning scientist who has been pursuing independent research in paleobiology since 1996. She is the author of two works of nonfiction:
The Story of More and the bestselling
Lab Girl. Recognized by
Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Jahren 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 in Norway.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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)

You have probably been hearing about climate change your whole life. Maybe you’ve seen it on the news, or seen movies about it, or read about it in school, or heard people debating about it in your home. You’ve probably heard people ask if climate change is real. Is it something we should be afraid of? When will it happen and how bad will it be? You may have heard it called a “hoax.” You may have heard it called “the biggest challenge your gen­eration will ever face.” You might even be sick of hearing about it altogether.

You know what? I get it. I’m more than fifty years old, and I’ve been hearing people argue over climate change for at least twenty years. I am a scientist who studies climate change, and so—lucky me—I get to hear people argue about it almost every day. But lately I learned that the arguments go back much further than that.

In 1969, more than half a century ago, 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. The New York Times picked up the story, and Walter Wittmann of the US Navy immediately disagreed: he had seen no evidence of thinning during his monthly airplane flights over the pole.

But that’s not nearly all: in 1931, Thomas Edison said to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone, “The sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have