Water, 16 feet of it, smothers the southern tip of Manhattan, covering the landfill of Battery Park City. Tropic coral reefs are stripped of life, their rocks pocked with contusions. Polar bears rummage in junk heaps seeking food amid construction debris. Glaciers split into ice chips, floods ravage coastlines, droughts parch the Earth and forest fires rage untamable.
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.
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