Hot Air and Glacial Change: A Case Study

Is there any controversy about climate change? Not at the Smithsonian! The National Museum of Natural History has found a way to open two new climate change exhibits, starting Friday, without a single smithereen of contentiousness. We get just the facts: Planet's getting warmer, arctic ice is melting, Inuit are out of sorts, Siberia is thawing. The future? "Models predict different outcomes," a sign says.

It's all rather low-key. The museum declined to include any stuffed polar bears. The one stuffed caribou is too high on a platform to pet. Nor did anyone realize how cool it would have been to have an Al Gore statue -- one that, every 20 minutes, suddenly starts talking (because, you know, it's really him !!!). Instead we see pictures of dwindling ice caps, and graphs of the greenhouse effect and fluctuating surface albedo. We learn about the primitive atmosphere, the rise of photosynthesis, the Oxygen Boom, the Cambrian Explosion, the hot Eocene, the cold Pleistocene, the comfy Holocene.

Please memorize: exosphere, thermosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere, troposphere.

There's an interactive globe that would be neat to have in your house if you could be sure it wouldn't break within a week. The 1954 photograph of Pasadena housewives wearing gas masks and carrying Fight Smog placards is nice, as is the film of Inuit people somehow living in a world where fish come out of a hole in the ice. But there are also sections that you would be tempted to compare to watching paint dry were it not for the danger that a curator might steal the idea for the next climate change exhibit.

The two new exhibits, which run through Nov. 30, were conceived separately and yoked under the label of "Forces of Change." You can enter the hall at either end, meaning you can start with the ice exhibit ("Arctic: A Friend Acting Strangely" -- you decide, worst title ever?) and then proceed to the air exhibit ("Atmosphere: Change Is in the Air" -- no, that gets the vote here), or you can start with the air exhibit and go to the ice.

The ice-first method might make most sense, simply because it takes the molecule-intensive topic of climate change and puts a human face on it. Much of the conversation on global warming turns on climate models and the IPCC consensus and the North Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation and whatnot, so it's helpful to recall that for many people the issue isn't esoteric.

A testimonial: "Zacharias Aqquiaruq, an elder in Arctic Canada, recently described the weather as uggianaqtuq , an Inuit word that can suggest strange, unexpected behavior." There are photos of permafrost collapsing, of villages on the verge of being washed away by arctic seas. A set of panels explains how the arctic ice cover reflects solar radiation back into space. We learn that pregnant caribou struggle in soggy snow to reach their calving grounds.

The atmosphere exhibit goes back billions of years, and reveals how life and the air evolved in tandem. A film graphically shows that only Earth has a habitable atmosphere among the worlds of our solar system. We learn of the environmental victory over ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons. Poke around and you'll find out that Eurypterus remipes , a sea scorpion that ate trilobites, is the New York state fossil.

But are we ruining our atmosphere? Here's a picture of Lyndon Johnson signing the Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965. Wall text: "Air in the United States is cleaner, but industrialization threatens air quality in developing countries such as China and India."

Perhaps we should be pleased that the museum has steered clear of the recent public-museum habit of trying to make Americans hate themselves and their ancestors and their civilization. This time there is no attempt to delve into the thorny topic of climate change policy (should we have ratified Kyoto? -- check another museum) or make people feel guilty about their profligate, carboniferous, vain, environment-ravaging lifestyles. There are no wall texts saying, for example, "Because you drove to the museum in a gas-guzzling beast of an automobile, a reindeer just died."

And perhaps we might also note that putting together museum exhibits on climate change can't be easy, since climate involves air, and air is invisible except in places like Los Angeles. The museum has tackled that problem directly, mounting a transparent display case that at first glance and all subsequent glances appears to be empty. The accompanying text says it contains 5.2 cubic feet of nitrogen and 1.4 cubic feet of oxygen and a bunch of trace gases. It lists the market price of these gases, in pennies, and adds, "Value of clean air: priceless."

Clever, but it's still an empty case.

Any exhibit on the atmosphere runs the risk of being gaseous. And then the argon crowd will say that, once again, they didn't get their due, and the helium people will complain in their squeaky voices. The methane guys will make their abominable noises. But many visitors of all persuasions might wonder why there's not more in these exhibits about carbon dioxide.

You can't pick up a newspaper or a national magazine without hearing that greenhouse gas emissions, and specifically CO2, are threatening life as we know it. Even Vanity Fair has made climate change a cover story, complete with photo illustrations of how rising sea levels would terrorize Martha's Vineyard and the Hamptons. (End. Of. The. World.) So where is the CO2in these exhibits? You have to hunt for it. You can find a mention on a panel that is otherwise devoted to a Smithsonian experiment to study how plants absorb carbon dioxide:

"Human activity increases the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere -- mainly carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). The extra greenhouse gas may be trapping too much heat, abnormally raising Earth's temperature."

Asked about the neutral tone of the exhibits, the museum's director, Cristian Samper, said: "We do not advocate a particular solution, just because that's not our role as a museum of natural history. We won't tell you what to think."

When a reporter asked exhibit designer Barbara Stauffer why there wasn't more of a discussion about the role of humans in climate change, she said, "It's about the science." She added, "I think it undermines what we do in the exhibit if we start pointing fingers."

She went further: "It's about functions of the atmosphere. It's not a climate change exhibit."

No argument here.