The hall covers all the planet’s climate changes — and the extinctions that followed — but it puts special emphasis on the one that is occurring now and what people can do to mitigate it. “We want to leave people interested and urgently hopeful,” Wing said.

Museum director Kirk Johnson said that climate change is controversial now the way evolution was in the past.

“In the 90s, you didn’t want to say the E-word in a dinosaur hall,” he said. Other museums have climate change exhibits, he said, but people can easily avoid them. “Here, the message is embedded.”

That message is interwoven through the myriad hands-on displays.

You can touch the surface of a rock that is billions of years old. You can stand in a fossil-filled replica coal mine and learn how climate change helped form coal millions of years ago and how burning that coal contributes to climate change now. You can play an interactive game to see clever, Earth-friendly ways to grow chocolate, make pizza or tend soccer fields. You can stand in a simulated ice core that looks like a sci-fi transporter tube and shows 800,000 years of temperature changes.

But if you’re just passing through, you get the point in just a few words.

“We went through all of our content for each area, and we said, if a visitor reads nothing else, what do you want them to know?” said Siobhan Starrs, the project manager for the hall. “And we printed it really large, right in front of a charismatic fossil.”

Starrs said curators want to convey to visitors that “we don’t live in a vacuum. We live on a planet that’s constantly changing, and we’re connected to it. Everything’s hitched to everything else.”