Can New York's Climate Museum save the planet?

Is it possible to promote solutions to the human-caused warming of global climates through interactive displays, 3D movies, a gift shop and all the other methods of the modern museum?

That's what the Climate Museum Launch Project hopes. Last week, the Board of Regents of New York State gave it a five-year provisional charter to create a climate museum in New York city. Soon, tourists could be supplementing trips to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum with a troubling, or perhaps inspiring, visit to a museum full of climate-related exhibits. The plan is to focus on "solutions", reports . A design for the building has even been proposed by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson.

It sounds like a welcome new way to look at the most pressing issue of our time - of any time? - but it is also an immense challenge. How can a museum deal with this topic in a way that is genuinely informative, intelligent, honest and accessible without being patronising? The Science Museum in London has notably failed to do so. Its Atmosphere gallery manages to patronise visitors of all ages. Poorly conceived interactive displays turn climate issues into a bad computer game.

Anyone who is still a sceptic about the overwhelming evidence of long-term damage to our climate is ignoring the facts and spurning reason. The problem for the majority, who do accept that dangerous climate change is happening, is to make us focus on this reality instead of trying to forget it. That means thinking about solutions, which the Climate Museum project rightly proposes to do.

To act, people need hope. The problem with apocalyptic scenarios or claims that capitalism itself must be destroyed in order to save the planet is that they produce, in most people, a paralysing despair instead of the strength to act or even think.

But a visit to a museum can't just be a motivational session; it needs to be genuinely educational. And this means that to really work, a museum about climate needs to reinvent the science museum itself. There is an episode of where the family visits a science museum in which the joke is that it's just a giant playground. It is spot-on satire. All over the world, museums of science have abandoned "boring" displays of scientific instruments to entertain visitors with fun and games. In theory, the games are educational, but in practice the amount of scientific knowledge some museums share is incredibly slight.