It all starts with a basket of coal.

That's one of the first things you see when you walk into the American Museum of Natural History's ambitious new exhibition on global warming. Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future opened last month and runs through next summer. Once it closes in New York, it will travel to museums all over the world. (The video below offers a preview of the climate science on display.)

Through Climate Change, the museum tells the story of how humanity remade civilization and the planet with its reliance on fossil fuels -- and the impact those actions will likely have for centuries to come

I visited on Oct. 18, opening day, along with a pretty decent crowd. The exhibition is packed with information about global warming's causes and consequences, but my favorite part came at the end, when the focus switched to solutions. Guests got to share their own suggestions on squares of paper that were posted for others to see.

It's a serious and even sobering display, with lots of reading and grim dioramas and not much interactivity. It probably won't be the favorite of young kids (take 'em to see the dinosaurs instead), but many youngsters did get excited about suggesting solutions, which is heartening for the future. If you're already up on your global warming science and solutions, there's probably not a lot in the exhibit that will really surprise you.

But it's rewarding just to see global warming presented it in such a comprehensive and unequivocal fashion by one of the world's most popular and respected museums. I was happy, for instance, to tell Lisa Suatoni, one of NRDC's ocean scientists, that there's an entire section devoted to one of the most important but least-understood consequences of climate change: the impact it's having on our oceans and sea life.

About the only nod to skeptics -- those who would prefer that we stick our heads in the tar sands and ignore one of the greatest threats that human civilization has ever known -- comes near the beginning, with an acknowledgement that climate change isn't strictly a human invention.

"Yes," the exhibition says, "climate has changed throughout Earth's long history, but this time is different. For the first time, complex human societies are facing the consequences of climate change worldwide. ...

"And for the first time, humans are causing it."

It's all about energy

With that coal basket at the beginning, the exhibition makes it clear right from the start that this isn't just an environmental problem. It's also an energy problem, one that has its roots in a very different environmental crisis -- which was also an energy crisis.

Four hundred years ago, the great forests of northern Europe were disappearing, thanks to humanity's thirst for firewood. Faced with a growing population that needed to heat its homes, Europe turned to another natural resource: coal, the rock that burns.

It wasn't an easy transition, the exhibition shows. Coal blackened the sky and filled homes with soot. But it was available and it was cheap, and soon coal became the fuel of choice -- creating consequences whose impact would be felt centuries later.

On the wall across from the coal basket, a gleaming red line (replicating the Keeling Graph, but with better pictures) traces the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since Europeans first started spewing coal ash from their furnaces. The line begins in 1600 near the visitor's ankles. Around 1650, it starts to rise, slowly but steadily.

In the 1800s, as fossil fuels power an explosion of factories worldwide, the climb gets steeper, and by the mid-20th century -- when electricity and cars create ever-greater energy demands -- the red line takes off like a rocket, soaring high above the head of guests.

The message of that red line paints global warming in stark and simple terms: Carbon dioxide helps heat the planet, just like firewood did the homes of old Europe. But now the wood has spilled out of the fireplace and filled the entire living room, threatening to burn the whole place down.

Solutions needed now

There's more carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere today than at any time in the past 800,000 years, and probably much longer. That's before human beings had even evolved.

Humanity spread across the globe, invented agriculture and technology, and grew to a population of 6 billion within a certain range of climate conditions. What happens when those conditions change, rapidly and radically?

That's the question that came to mind as I traversed the Climate Change exhibit. And it's not a cheery prospect.

The exhibition ends by bringing the focus back to energy, presenting options that range from solar to nuclear to geothermal as alternatives to fossil fuels.

Again, I was reminded of that basket at the beginning: Just as the Europeans replaced firewood with coal, we now have a chance to replace the petroleum products that are cooking our planet with new sources of energy.

It's good to remember that it's happened before, in a fairly short timeframe -- and that means it can happen again, just as quickly, if we set our minds to it.

But it's also a good reminder that we should take the opportunity to do it right this time, finding renewable sources of energy that will help heal our planet -- not give it yet another disease.