Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future

There is nothing quite like New York City during the holiday season so, each December Justin and I make it a point to visit.  Our traditional agenda includes the following: 1. Watching people fall down on the ice rink in Rockefeller Center while scarfing down the outrageously yummy shrimp chop chop salad at the Rock Center Café  2. Drinking $18 martinis at The Peninsula Hotel’s Pen-Top Bar while shamelessly hoping to spot a celeb or two and  3. Visiting a new exhibit at one of our favorite NYC museums.  Typically agenda item number three involves some negotiating because my super geek fiancé votes American Museum of Natural History every damn year while I’m more of a MOMA gal myself.  Lucky for him, this year the Natural History Museum got my vote as well.

The second day of our trip, we hopped in a snazzy new hybrid taxi and headed uptown to check out the museum’s new Climate Change exhibit.  I’d read about this particular exhibit on the MSNBC website back in October and felt it was my Organic Bug blog writing duty to check it out. As a proud member of the green brigade generation, I was prepared to not learn much I didn’t already know, but three hours later I left the museum with a mind titillating with new environmental facts for my arsenal.

The exhibit takes visitors through a slew of climate related issues and is sometimes a bit preachy, but overall there is a nice balance between “here’s what we’ve done” and “here’s how we can change it.”  The interactive components of the exhibit help hit major points home on a very intimate level, and the recommended actions for change go well beyond the standard buy a Brita and convert to reusable shopping bags.

My favorite parts of the exhibit highlighted global adaptation efforts.  Throughout the exhibit, you can read about innovative ways in which communities around the world have learned to cope with climate impact.  For example, the people in Bangladesh have learned to make floating gardens to prevent loss of crops during massive floods brought on by monsoons.  And in The Netherlands, Dutch residents started building homes designed to float to avoid having to evacuate when floods waters rush through the low-lying region.

Shown in this picture is the carbon line. Right when you walk in to the exhibit hall there’s a mural on the wall with an illuminated red line over it.  As you walk from one end of the mural to the other, the line gets higher and higher demonstrating the atmospheric carbon level changes between before the Industrial Revolution and today. Pretty frightening reality.

If you’re in the city between now and summer ’09, I would say that this exhibit is certainly worth the $24!