V2 Climate & Energy Exhibit

Fire made us human.

Until the Devonian Period about 420 million years ago, there was little life on land. That means there was little to burn as fuel supplies were under water. Thus, fire played a minimal role in the first 90% of Earth’s history. But fire is absolutely central to human history.

Humans or their ancestors have had control of fire for somewhere between 400,000 and 2,000,000 years. We are the only species that can control fire. The use of fire to cook helped us evolve into who we are by aiding in digestion. It also strengthened social ties as we gathered around fire to protect the fire, to cook, to warm, and to tell stories.

Fire makes our modern way of life possible.

Imagine what would happen if all fire on Earth stopped burning for 24 hours.

Everything you can see right now is here in some meaningful way because of fossil fuels. In 2016, New Yorkers got 74% of their energy by burning fossil fuels. We also burn biomass and garbage, so the total share of our energy from burning is greater than that. Yet, for many of us, fire is an uncommon sight in daily life. Internal combustion engines, furnaces, boilers, water heaters, and distant power plants put fire out of sight and out of mind. And these things make our modern way of life possible.

Many of us in the industrialized world can go weeks without seeing flame, but most of us are never out of sight of the products of fire.

Fire reverses photosynthesis.

Plants takes carbon dioxide from the air, combine it with water and build the materials of life. Most fuel, in one way or another, starts here. Life has been photosynthesizing for as long as there have been living things that are green - billions of years.

Photosynthesis has been making fuel in huge quantities for more than two billion years. Most of that decays away, but certain Earth processes bury, concentrate and preserve some of this fuel as fossil fuels. Again, these processes have been at work with huge quantities of organic materials over huge quantities of time.

Fire requires oxygen, fuel, heat and a sustained chemical reaction to burn. Combustion reactions - fires - commonly combines hydrocarbons in fuel with oxygen in the atmosphere and produces carbon dioxide, water, and energy. Thus, the carbon dioxide taken out of the air by photosynthesis returns to it through fire.

In the last 250 years, we have released carbon trapped by those hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis. This has changed the composition of the atmosphere and how it behaves. This is at the heart of modern climate change.

Fire endangers our modern way of life.

By disaster or by design, we will deal with the consequences of all of this burning. Carbon dioxide has already substantially changed the way our planet regulates its climate. Civilization and agriculture arose between twelve and fifteen thousand years ago. Since that time, the climate has remained remarkably stable. In the last few decades, the climate has begun to change at a faster rate than it has not only since the dawn of agriculture and of civilization, but also for the entirety of humanity’s time on Earth. Agriculture and civilization depend upon a stable climate. We no longer have a stable climate. What does this mean for agriculture, for civilization, and for humanity?

Climate & Energy Exhibit version 2

Impacts of climate change

(Extend line so it appears to go through the ceiling. Include sculpture in the plaza above that is a continuation of the line. And/or paint the ceiling so it appears the line continues upward.)

Content TBD. Have this be very visual, with photos showing impacts on people (maybe public health- and livelihood-related), other life, ecosystems, agriculture, infrastructure, the economy, transportation, etc.

Include quotes and stories.

Climate and Energy in the Anthropocene

And beyond...

Rising temperatures, changing patterns of precipitation, rising oceans, and more extreme weather events affect all of us.

(Icons from ResilientMA

Clearinghouse)

We live in the Anthropocene, a time when humans have altered the planet's systems. Very little—if anything—has escaped our influence, including the Earth's water, atmosphere, soil, plants, animals, microbes, and climate.

This Museum is about the history of life on Earth, and climate change is part of that story. Throughout Earth’s history, organisms have evolved in response to climate shifts, whether a series of ice ages that came and went on time scales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years, or alternations between warm and cold conditions on time scales of tens of millions of years. Sometimes the climate shifts were so rapid or extreme that they contributed to mass extinctions that wiped out most of the planet's species.

Life also affects climate. For example, plants take in carbon dioxide (CO2) through photosynthesis. CO2 in the atmosphere traps heat around the Earth, so a change in its concentration affects global climate. During the Carboniferous period, vast forests of ancient trees pulled in enough CO2 to cool the world.

Today the Earth is warming, but much more rapidly than in the past. Once again, life is changing the climate—this time it is humans who are behind it. When we extract and burn fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) to generate energy, we emit carbon-based gases into the atmosphere that trap heat around the Earth. The energy we use to power our homes, vehicles, and industries has a direct connection to the climate and all other life on Earth.

Really rapid change, since the 1980s

Understanding the greenhouse effect

TBD

Rapid change: the last 150 years

Climate proxies: clues to ancient climates and CO2

How do we know about past climates and past levels of atmospheric CO2? We have excellent temperature records from instruments on satellites going back to the 1970s, and on the surface of the Earth going back to the late 1800s. Before then the instrumented records get spotty, but luckily nature has provided us with climate proxies: records from the past not from thermometers, rain gauges, and CO2 detectors, but from plants, animals, mud, rocks, and ice!

Climate is a system

What we can do

You are seeing your image from a camera that senses the infrared energy (heat) you radiate. The Earth also radiates infrared energy.

Every object radiates energy, and the kind of energy depends on its temperature. The Sun is very hot and radiates mostly visible light. The Earth absorbs energy it receives from visible sunlight, and re-radiates the same amount of energy. But being much cooler than the Sun, the Earth radiates infrared energy. It is this infrared energy that is trapped by greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane (CH4) in the atmosphere.

Interactives and artifacts:

Timeline points, to be highlighted on a graph like the one below.

1859: Oil discovered in western Pennsylvania

1882: World's first coal-burning electric power plant

1908: The first Model T rolls of the Ford Motor Company's assembly line

1958: Atmospheric CO2 measurements begin at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The initial level is 316 ppm (parts per million), having risen above the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm.

1960: The world's population is about 3 billion.

2000: The world's population is about 6 billion.

2010: Sea level in New York City had risen by about a foot since 1900 from thermal expansion of a warming ocean and increased melting of ice sheets and glaciers.

2016: Atmospheric CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa now are above 400 ppm. The last time atmospheric CO2 was this high was around 3 million years ago.

2018: Global mean surface temperature has risen 1.8 °F (1 °C) since 1880.

Reinforcing feedbacks: how warming leads to more warming

Our planet's climate system, like many systems, has reinforcing feedbacks that amplify changes. This is especially clear in the Arctic.

Artifact(s): sediment core, forams?

Specimen: Fossil leaf, maybe in a drawer, and a microscope image showing the stomata.

Artifact: mock ice core, maybe in a drawer. We don't need to construct another crank-up one since there's already one in the Glacier exhibit.

Specimen: fossilized or modern clam. It would be ideal if visitors could touch it. Find a specimen with obvious growth bands, and invite visitors to count the rings and guess the clam's age (if a fossil, the age before it was preserved).

Interactive: approx. life-size tree trunk

with incremental borer that visitors can push and pull in and out of the tree.

Think of the Earth's climate as a delicate instrument with many different control knobs which can fine-tune the system. The biggest control knob is the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.

CO2 gas in our atmosphere absorbs heat radiated from the surface of the Earth. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more heat is trapped around the Earth, and the warmer our planet becomes. This is called the greenhouse effect. A Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius worked out the physics and chemistry of this effect in 1896.

Earth’s systems control the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere: the oceans absorb atmospheric CO2, volcanoes release CO2 when they erupt, and plants take in CO2 through photosynthesis. These and other natural processes are at work today, but with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution humans began to shift the carbon balance by burning fossil fuels, releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere.

About half of the CO2 put into the atmosphere by human activities has been added since around 1980. We are warming our planet now more rapidly than at almost any other time in Earth's 4.5 billion year history that we know about, and certainly faster than at any other time in the 10,000-year history of human civilization!

Note from Don: It might be nice to have a tree cookie and a section of log from the same tree.

Note from Don: IAlex Bartholemew (sp?) gave oob and I nice lesson on strata. We could touch base with him for more info.

Ice cores are long cylinders of ice drilled through layer upon layer of snowfalls in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, as well as some mountain glaciers. They hold records of the temperatures and atmospheric CO2 at the time the snow fell, which scientists can extract from chemical analysis of oxygen isotopes in the ice itself and CO2 trapped in bubbles within the ice. The longest of these records goes back about 800,000 years.

Tree rings

You can tell the age of a tree by counting its rings. You can also learn something from the rings about the climate during the time the tree grew. When the climate is warm and wet, trees tend to grow more rapidly, and the spacing between rings is wider than during dry years.

Fossil clams

Clam shells have annual growth bands similar to tree rings, and the spacing between the bands depends on the environment during the time the growth bands form. Analysis of oxygen isotope ratios in clam shells can also reveal the water temperature during the winters and summers in which the clams lived. We can learn about climates from millions of years ago from fossil clams.

Most of what we know about the history of Earth’s climate comes layers of sediment. Especially well-preserved records are found in sediment cores up to thousands of meters long taken from the deep sea. These records extend as far back as 200 million years (older sea floor sediments have been destroyed along plate tectonic boundaries).

Within the cores, most of the information about climate comes from the chemistry of one-celled plankton that sank to the ocean bottom after death. For example, the ratio of two varieties (isotopes) of oxygen atoms in shells of foraminifera is a good proxy for water temperature. Other chemical data from cores provide information on carbon dioxide concentration and ocean acidity.

Fossil leaves

Leaves have pores called stomata through which gases such as oxygen, water vapor, and CO2 pass between the plant and the atmosphere. When atmospheric CO2 is high, plants with fewer stomata can thrive, and when CO2 is low plants need more stomata to absorb what they need. Density of stomata in fossilized leaves can tell us about the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere many millions of years ago.

Interactive: infrared camera pointed at visitors, and a monitor

displaying the real-time image.

A set of materials, maybe on a wheel or rack, that visitors can position between themselves

and the camera.

Alternative: model of the Earth

Factoid: Arctic sea ice waxes and wanes on a seasonal cycle, but as the region has warmed over the last forty years, the overall area covered by sea ice has declined rapidly.

Try putting different materials between you and the camera. Which ones block the heat you radiate and which ones don't? Which ones can you see through (that is, they pass visible light), but block your heat?

The Earth's atmosphere is transparent to visible light, but traps some of the infrared energy radiated by the Earth. You can think of the atmosphere acting like a material that blocks heat (though it's not a perfect analogy, because some heat in Earth's atmosphere is re-radiated out to space).

TBD....our energy and solutions content goes here.

This would be a good place for a touch-screen monitor, allowing visitors to explore different energy visualizations.

Personalize the content with questions about how people got to the Museum & carbon footprint

Feedback/voting station: what actions can/do you take to use less energy?

Language choices: think about emphasizing energy

efficiency, energy savings

Display of energy generation from Museum solar panels

10,000 years of climate stability

Around 10,000 years ago, Earth’s climate entered a period of great stability, allowing for the development of agriculture and modern civilizations. Swings in climate took place, but they were relatively small compared with swings in the preceding million years.

Modern humans

Around 200,000 years ago, our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa. We survived climate challenges, including extreme drought around 70,000 to 90,000 years ago that almost led to our extinction.

Glaciers growing and retreating

The graph on this wall shows cycles of Earth's temperature and CO2 rising and falling during the last 800,000 years. During these cycles, great ice sheets grew and retreated.

These cyclical changes are driven by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and by changes in the Earth’s tilt and wobble about its axis. They are called Milankovitch cycles, named after the scientist who worked out the theory behind them in the 1920s.

(Highlight the last ~20,000 years on this graph)

Factoid: Methane is a very powerful greenhouse

gas, warming more rapidly than CO2.

(Need image here)

Climate change and energy before one million years ago

Use this guide to learn more about climate change and energy throughout the Museum.

Feel free to carry it with you in the Museum, and then return it here.

Maybe a John Gurche image?

The most recent ice age ends

Around 20,000 years ago the huge Laurentide ice sheet, which extended down from the Arctic and covered New York State in ice about a mile thick, began to melt.

(Don to expand/revise...)

Fire! The Earth and Us

Interactive: Laminated page with a self-guided tour to climate change and energy points of interest throughout the Museum. This could be larger than a standard sheet of paper. See mock-up below.

Don's note:

More here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-XNB_1PQYWHhrfZTQctTYS0JZnQfX1XLtGyYd8twPVc/edit#

And here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/166D5qEWThS-qAlR3bMDT9IJnxVw-bccbfE8ne1MbCuA/edit?usp=sharing

Interactive: faux flame, tasteful and with motion to catch the eye.

Time (years before present)

Does it make sense to reuse the carbon floormats from the Moving Carbon, Changing Earth exhibit?