Global Warming: Real but Solvable - For Now

Facts and Hope About Global Warming

A Chinese proverb says art has the power to bring life’s most complicated issues into brilliant clarity.  That’s precisely what the climate change exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in New York City does for the complexities of global warming, and it couldn’t happen at a better time.

The exhibition, Climate Change: The Threat to Life and A New Energy Future, opened at the museum October 18 and begins a worldwide tour August 16, 2009.  The displays are designed to deconstruct the interrelated complexities of a global predicament so enormous many have chosen to deny or ignore it rather than confront what seems insurmountable.  The great part about this demonstration is that it provides visitors with a variety of solutions they can literally take home with them and implement with ease.

Two children learning how big a metric ton of coal is. It takes 2.5 of these chunks to heat a home for two months.

The facts, figures and jargon of global warming melt into a supporting role as reality takes center stage at the museum.  The visually relatable and comprehensible displays interweave a multi-faceted story into a single theme that children and adults will be able to incorporate into their daily thinking about the issue.  Most importantly, it emphasizes that the problem does have a solution - even if the window for taking action is a brief one that’s rapidly closing.

Some highlights of the exhibition include a 60-foot panoramic illustration of how our technological advances have contributed to the rise in CO₂ emissions in our atmosphere. A red LED light graph rises with each new technological addition to the canvas.  It’s like walking into a scene of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, only now the facts are related directly to the objects we use every day.

The exhibit demonstrates how greenhouse gases are trapping heat with a model of one metric ton of coal.  It takes about 2.5 metric tons of coal to heat the average American home for two months, so visualizing hundreds of millions of these chunks floating in the air comes easily to anyone above the third grade.

Manhattan underwater. Polar ice has actually melted faster than the models originally predicted. Yes, it could happen without action now.

The impact of melting polar ice is perhaps one of the most easily understood concepts of all.  A model depicts Manhattan as a new-age Venice when sea levels rise to levels 16 feet higher than they are now.  There’s also a diorama of a polar bear foraging through a garbage dump as the species is forced closer to human populated areas with the loss of habitat.  There’s no diorama of Venice, but it isn’t hard to imagine where that story is going.

The droughts, floods and fires we’re already witnessing in the news on a regular basis are shown through cross-sections of real trees that faithfully record our climate change in certain terms.  The neighboring dioramas display the vast number of animal and plant species that are endangered by climate change, food shortages and competition for dwindling territory.  It could get ugly out there.

Dead coral juxtaposed against the colorful and beautiful live coral. The ocean is getting more acidic from burning fossil fuels.

The designers of the program were careful to include the alternatives we have to avoid further erosion in our quality of life.  Among them are clean energy options we have in solar, wind and nuclear power.  Carbon sequestration technology that captures and stores harmful emissions is also demonstrated.

The exhibition also gets down to the every day choices we make, and how minor changes are relatively easy to incorporate into our routines.  Taking public transit, using energy efficient appliances and paying bills online are all simple options requiring little or no sacrifice but make a big difference.

People of all ages will enjoy this magnificent display that communicates a very important idea.  Yes, we have a very big problem, but the solution is within our grasp if we act now.  Further delay only severely limits the available options.  It’s that simple to understand.

Michael Novacek, Senior Vice President and Provost for Science at the American Museum of Natural History summed it up best when he said, “… the basic message is that the problem is real, and given the right decisions and strategies, we have the means to deal with it.”  That’s a concept America and the world need to hear.  Thanks to the American Museum of Natural History, that will happen. 

Bank of America and The Rockefeller Foundation supported this important exhibition.  Additional support came from Mary and David Soloman, the Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation, The Linden Trust for Conservation and the Red Crane Foundation.  Please support the people and organizations that are working to see our world is a better one than it is today.

The American Museum of Natural History is located at Central Park West at 79^th Street in New York, NY.  Their website is http://www.amnh.org/, and it’s a site I recommend highly.  The exhibit’s page can be found here.