It happened in the blink of an eye. The waters around Manhattan rose more than three feet. Low-lying areas along the Hudson and East Rivers were swamped. It was Hurricane Sandy all over again, but this time, the high water was here to stay, and it would only continue to rise.
眨眼间，曼哈顿周围的河水就涨了三英尺多高，淹没了哈德逊河和东河沿岸的低地。这仿佛又是飓风“桑迪”(Hurricane Sandy)的情景，不过这一次猛涨的河水不仅没有退去，还只会继续上涨。
Miranda Massie did what anyone sane person would do in this situation. She fled to New Jersey. Her hand manipulated the virtual reality device at the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change in Hong Kong, and the newly inundated New York City was left behind for the relative dryness of Paramus. Or was it Hackensack?
米兰达·马西(Miranda Massie)在此时做了一件任何一个理智的人都会做的事情，那就是逃往新泽西。她在香港赛马会气候变化博物馆(Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change)，用手操作着虚拟现实仪器，刚刚纽约市洪水泛滥的场景瞬间变成了帕拉默斯(Paramus)相对干燥的场景。还是说，那里其实是哈肯萨克(Hackensack)？

Ms. Massie was in Hong Kong to visit what she says is the world’s only museum specifically devoted to an issue that many people, including herself, view as the most pressing one facing humankind. She’s the executive director of the Climate Museum Launch Project, a group based in New York that is seeking to build a similar, but far bigger and more ambitious, museum in Manhattan.
按照马西的说法，她来香港参观的这座博物馆，是唯一一座专门为气候变化议题建立的博物馆，而包括她在内的很多人都认为，这个议题是人类所面临的最紧迫的问题。马西是“气候博物馆启动项目”(Climate Museum Launch Project)的执行总监，这个总部位于纽约的团体力图在曼哈顿建立一座类似的博物馆，不过规模会更大，目标也会更大。
In Hong Kong, she sought ideas and inspiration. The museum, financed by a grant from a club that runs horse racing and other betting activities, had some to offer. One was the enormous projector screen that showed the effects of rising sea levels on cities across the globe. She found another in the photo booths at the end of the tour that offered digital pictures of the visitors in a polar setting — the Chinese research vessel Xue Long, or Snow Dragon, in the background, polar bears and penguins in the foreground. To get the photo, visitors have to make a simple carbon-reducing promise. Choices included “travel less by airplane,” “bring your own shopping bag” and “eat vegetables rather than meat.”
她到香港去寻找想法和启发，而这座博物馆给了她一些灵感。博物馆由一家从事赛马和其他博彩活动的俱乐部提供资金支持，馆内有一块用来投影的巨大银幕，向参观者展示海平面上升对全球城市所造成的影响。她还发现了另一个可以借鉴的东西，在参观的末尾处有几个自动照相棚，可以为参观者生成极地场景下的数字图像——照片中远处是中国的雪龙号极地考察船，近处则是北极熊和企鹅。如果想要得到照片，参观者必须做出一个简单的减碳承诺，可以选择“出行少坐飞机”、“自带购物袋”，或者“多吃蔬菜少吃肉”。
At the end of the tour, a screen showed the effect of the combined commitments of the more than 27,000 people who have made the pledges: 997.8 million grams of carbon removed from the atmosphere.
在参观的末尾处，一个屏幕上显示了超过2.7万人的承诺会起到怎样的影响：大气中的减碳量达到了9.978亿克。
“It’s very hard to communicate effectively with a 5-year-old and a 45-year-old,” Ms. Massie said. “So you have to build really sophisticated and interactive displays to do that.”
“要想同时与5岁的孩子和45岁的大人进行有效沟通是很难的，”马西说道，“所以需要打造一个很先进，并且具有互动性的展览。”
It is the focus on what people can do collectively to reduce carbon emissions that will be the main focus of the New York museum, rather than a scary look at what the future may hold — flooded coastal cities, droughts, storms. Those calamities will not be ignored, but the focus will be on ways to mitigate climate change and to adapt to it.
纽约的博物馆主要是想让人们了解，如何通过集体的努力来减少碳排放，而不是给他们看可怕的未来，例如洪水泛滥的沿海城市，干旱或暴风雨。不是要无视这些灾难，而是要关注如何缓解和适应气候变化。
“There’s research currently that shows the more people learn about climate, the more they tend to emotionally shut down and disengage,” Ms. Massie said. “Not everybody, but most people. Because it’s distressing and because it’s very clear that just changing the light bulbs in your own home doesn’t matter. So you have to make it clear that you’re part of a broader set of efforts and those broader efforts can succeed.”
“当前的研究显示，对气候了解得越多，人们就越会情感崩溃并且选择回避，”马西说道，“虽然不是每个人都这样，但大多数人会这样。因为这会让人忧虑，大家也很清楚只是更换自己家里的电灯泡也是不管用的。所以讲清楚，你自己是更宏大的努力中的一员，而这些更广泛的努力可以获得成功。”
The Hong Kong museum occupies one floor of a high-rise building on a university campus. Since it opened in December 2013, it has brought in just over 56,000 visitors, more than a third of them students. The museum’s goal, according to its program director, Cecilia Lam, is to raise awareness of climate change in Hong Kong, especially among children.
香港的气候变化博物馆在一所大学校园的一栋高层建筑里占据了一层。自从2013年12月开放以来，它已经吸引了超过5.6万名参观者，其中超过三分之一是学生。据项目主管杨诗诗称，这座博物馆的目的是在香港提升民众对气候变化的认识，特别是在儿童中间。
“The major difference between our project and Miranda’s — it seems to me that they focus on the whole world,” Ms. Lam said. “Our main group of targets is people in Hong Kong.”
“我们的项目和米兰达的项目之间主要区别是，在我看来他们注重于整个世界，”杨诗诗说。“我们的主要目标人群是香港人。”
Ms. Massie, 48, who worked for years as a public-interest lawyer, is looking for donors. She hopes to set up an interim museum, bigger than the one in Hong Kong, in an office building or even on a barge in New York in the next two years, with a permanent site in Manhattan (or possibly Brooklyn) by 2020.
作为一个多年来致力于公益诉讼的律师，48岁的马西正在寻求捐助者。她希望在接下来的两年里建立一家临时的博物馆，要比香港的这座大，可以在纽约的一栋写字楼里甚至大型游船上，直到2020年在曼哈顿（或者在布鲁克林）找到一座永久性的场所。
And Ms. Massie’s goal is far more ambitious. The New York museum would aim to attract at least a million visitors a year and seek to influence the world, including political leaders in the United States. At the end of the tour, visitors would be encouraged to volunteer their time to help groups that are trying to address climate change: doing anything from making calls on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council to volunteering to help elect a candidate who is determined to reduce carbon emissions.
马西的目标还远不止于此。纽约的博物馆计划每年吸引至少一百万的游客并企图影响世界，包括美国的政治领袖们。在参观最后，会鼓励游客花一些时间，志愿帮助那些正努力应对气候变化的团体：比如以自然资源保护协会(Natural Resources Defense Council)的名义打电话，再比如志愿帮助选举一个有决心减少碳排放的候选人。
“We want to be a hub for the world for climate solutions,” Ms. Massie said. “We want to be a beacon for the world.”
“我们想要成为全世界气候问题解决方案的一个中心，”马西说。“我们想要成为世界的一座灯塔。”
The goals of the Hong Kong museum are far more modest. Absent from the museum is any prominent mention of the fact that Hong Kong is part of a country, China, that is far and away the world’s leading carbon emitter, putting about twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as the No. 2 polluter, the United States.
香港的博物馆目标则要谦逊得多。在这座博物馆里，看不到任何关于香港是中国一部分的醒目提示，后者向大气中排放的碳大约是第二排放国美国的两倍，碳排放量遥居世界首位。
The many schoolchildren coming to the Hong Kong museum on field trips get a very different message. The first part of the museum replicates a trip on the Xue Long, highlighting its polar research, displaying mock-ups of ice cores taken from the polar regions and discussing the dangers climate change poses to polar bears, penguins and seals.
很多来到香港的博物馆参观的小学生得到了一个不同寻常的信息。博物馆的第一部分复制了雪龙号上的一次旅程，突出了它的极地研究，展示了从极低挖出的冰芯的模型，并讨论了气候变化对北极熊、企鹅和海豹产生的危害。
“The use of Xue Long is just one way to get the public interested in what the scientists are doing,” Ms. Lam said. “We tried to use a storytelling approach.”
“运用雪龙号的例子，只是让公众对科学家所做的事情感兴趣的一种方法，”杨诗诗说。“我们尝试采取了讲故事的手段。”
Back in “New York,” the simulator increases the water level. One meter, two meters, three meters, four. Ms. Massie noted that one possible future for New York is for some parts to surrender to the waters, to become a sort of Venice. Charming as that might sound, rising sea levels, she says, will be especially devastating for people living in coastal regions of poor nations, such as Bangladesh. It was the enormity of the problem that led Ms. Massie to shift her focus away from school desegregation and affirmative action and toward the environment.
回到“纽约”，模拟器升高了海平面。一米，两米，三米，四米。马西注意到纽约可能的一个未来就是其中一部分要被水淹没，变得有点像威尼斯。听起来可能很迷人，但她说，不断上涨的海平面，对于住在贫穷国家沿海地区的人们——比如孟加拉国——毁灭性尤其巨大。正是这个问题的严重性，使马西把她的注意从阻止学校的种族隔离和平权措施(affirmative action)转移到了环境问题。
“I came to see climate change specifically is going to determine our fate as a species in a way that none of these other things is capable of doing,” she said.
“我看到气候变化将会以一种特别的，其他问题所不能的方式，决定我们作为一个物种的命运，”她说。