[H/T to Marc]   Excerpts: If the End of Days were going to be portrayed in a museum exhibition, it might look like the array of natural disasters, both real and imagined, that can be found at “Climate Change,” which opens Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History.

There is something almost biblical about these worst-case scenarios, apocalyptically suggested even in the subtitle: “The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future.” And if the plagues promised with global warming don’t include an onslaught of frogs, there is more than enough to worry about: the exhibition predicts proliferation of malaria and desperate foraging of wildlife. […] 

Emerging from this ambitious and, at times, overwrought show, you almost expect to see a new set of dioramas and fossilized skeletons showing how Homo sapiens once dwelt on this planet in arrogant mastery before the species burned its way to oblivion. […]

The main impression, instead, is of an almost religious urgency. “Repent!” these displays seem to call out, “Repent! Before it’s too late!” And perhaps the religious overtones are no accident. Recently the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote in The New York Review of Books that environmentalism has become a “worldwide secular religion” in which the “path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.” Only here the urgency is not otherworldly. […]

And if there are counterarguments to be made about aspects of global warming, why can’t they be addressed here? Take a look at the two sides of the Web site climatedebatedaily.com to see how much disagreement there can be. This exhibition, in other words, made me feel like an agnostic attending church and listening to sermons about damnation. It may all be true — some of it assuredly is — but from a museum, particularly one devoted to natural science, it is reasonable to seek more revelation. […]

And while there is a scientific consensus about global warming, there is also a significant minority of skeptics about one portion or another of the theory, and the issues are notoriously complex. Mr. Dyson said the minority of scientific skeptics and the majority of scientific believers now engage in a passionate “dialogue of the deaf,” in which very little debate or convincing goes on. […]

Apocalypse is too easy a prediction when there is so much still uncertain; no one has succeeded in completely modeling climate’s past, let alone its future. “Many experts think,” we are told, that warmer ocean waters will make hurricanes more powerful. But “it is difficult to predict how much more intense hurricanes could become.” That makes it seem as if this is some rough guess, when the claims being made for climate change are in the precision of the observations and conclusions. And are the “many experts” even correct about hurricanes? The scientist (and global-warming skeptic) Roy W. Spencer has pointed out that experts at the National Hurricane Center have been warning for deca des that there had been a lull in hurricane activity and that a natural 30-to-40-year cycle would bring on a resurgence, something having no connection at all to global warming.

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