41 pages • 1 hour read
Hope JahrenThe Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPart 4, Chapters 14-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Earth”
Part 4, Chapter 14 Summary: “Altered Air”
In this short, five-page chapter, Jahren takes a quick foray into carbon dioxide. When humans pluck fossil fuels from the depths of the Earth and burn them to create energy, the process releases a heavy dose of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This gas would have normally stayed trapped and harmless inside the ground. The carbon dioxide molecule holds onto heat, so when it’s released into the atmosphere in great doses, it warms the atmosphere.
Part 4, Chapter 15 Summary: “Warming Weather”
Jahren opens with a discussion of what she perceives to be weather: It’s part wind, part temperature, part sun. These factors are constantly moving and changing, creating complex weather patterns. During her childhood in Minnesota, the winters were uncomfortably cold, but that is now changing: “Minnesota, along with the rest of the Midwest, has become downright balmy since I was a kid, and more and more of what used to be snow now comes down as rain” (135). The increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have raised the global temperature by 1.5 °F in the last century, but that fact does not necessarily mean the weather will simply feel warmer. Instead, global warming is causing extreme weather patterns that result in both hot and cold results: cold fronts, heat waves, droughts, and floods. The term “global weirding” better describes the erratic weather patterns of our present and future.
International efforts to address global warming, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), have attempted to bring nations together to tackle the crisis. These efforts have been largely symbolic and therefore unsuccessful: “The problem is that there’s no way to enforce a cultural aspiration posing as an international agreement; so far, nations have gone to war in order to secure fossil fuels, not to desecure them” (138). Fossil fuels, in other words, are still highly protected resources despite the international agreements or green initiatives to which countries may provide surface-level support. The difficult work of divesting from fossil fuels is simply not happening quickly enough at the national or international level.
Part 4, Chapters 14-15 Analysis
Jahren uses fear to engage her readers—a choice that is particularly clear in these chapters. Discussing carbon dioxide, Jahren writes: “The biggest pollutant coming from our power plants and vehicles is something that you can’t see or smell, and you might not even notice it becoming a problem. It’s a gas called carbon dioxide, and there’s more and more of it every year, and it just might kill us all” (124). This type of writing is controversial because it can have the unintended effect of making readers shut down, turn away from the problem of global warming, and do nothing to improve the problem.
Chapter 15 follows a similar template, concluding with a terrifying statement: “We’re down to about three generations to figure out how humanity might survive civilization” (141). Despite such sentences, Jahren discourages the use of fear-based media to scare individuals into caring about climate change. “Again, I’m just a lab girl,” she writes in reference to her first book, Lab Girl, “but the idea of scaring the public for the sake of scaring it scares me” (139). Inadvertently, The Story of More may do just that if readers finish the book feeling scared, overwhelmed, and unsure what to do next besides eating less meat the next day. Readers seeking a how-to, step-by-step guide for fighting climate change can read works like Mary DeMocker’s The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution.
A majority of The Story of More addresses the first portion of the subtitle, “How We Got to Climate Change.” Chapter 14 marks the turn into the climate-change portion of the book: “Where to Go from Here.” It also marks a shift in Jahren’s rhetoric. On topics that pose an ethical dilemma, such as slaughtering animals or using nuclear power to generate electricity, Jahren does not often adopt a strong stance. However, when it comes to the reality of global warming, her views are strong. “I cannot overemphasize how clear this data is,” she writes (136). Global warming is real, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and always worsening.
