Jay Critchley has fanciful but real plans for an amusement park in Nantucket Sound dedicated to sources of energy. Critchley has also parodied Boston's infamous Big Dig construction project.

The latest show at The Andy Warhol Museum doesn't get into any polite debates about whether global warming is for real. Its take on the matter is as direct -- and dangerous-feeling -- as the gunpowder Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang used for his work "Black Fireworks" at the heart of the exhibition.

Former Pittsburgher Greg Kwiatek's "Number Seven," from a series of monstrous paintings inspired by seaweed and debris the artist finds during low tide. Click photo for larger image. '6 BILLION PERPS HELD HOSTAGE!' Where: Andy Warhol Museum, North Side. When: Opening festivities are from 6-9 p.m. Saturday. The exhibit is open to the public from Sunday through June 17. Tickets: $15 for Saturday. Information: 412-237-8300.

Cai, an internationally known artist now working on the opening ceremonies for next year's Beijing Summer Olympics, is known for big statements. He has long performed daylight fireworks exhibitions that invert black smoke against blue skies, as a comment on humanity's destruction of the environment, and each other.

In similar fashion, "Black Fireworks: Project for IVAM" is a 44-foot-long panel torched with gunpowder, which looks both organic and scary.

The repeated international performances of his explosive projects, Cai has said, "is intended as a series of omens of widespread unease."

Enter Warhol's own attraction to disasters -- environmental and otherwise -- and you have yourself a show. Works by Warhol, Cai and a dozen others comprise "6 BILLION PERPS HELD HOSTAGE! Artists Address Global Warming," running Sunday through June 17.

The exhibition is run through with doom but has a playful side as well. It begins with a cartoon for "Climate Mash," a "Monster Mash" parody taking on oil companies and the Bush administration. It has two "SurvivaBalls," fake global warming survival suits that performance artists The Yes Men presented at a real (and unsuspecting) insurance conference in Florida.

A crochet version of Australia's dying Great Barrier Reef called "Crochet Hyperbolic Coral Reef: Coral and Anemone Garden." Click photo for larger image.

Australian sisters Christine and Margaret Wertheim, of the Institute for Figuring, display their "Crochet Hyperbolic Coral Reef," an homage to the dying Great Barrier Reef made of yarn. The work, the sisters' Web site says, is "a celebration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft, and a testimony to the disappearing wonders of the marine world." (Margaret Wertheim will lead a workshop at 11 a.m. Sunday. Space is limited to 15 guests.)

The title of the exhibition, curator Matt Wrbican says, is meant to evoke the screaming headlines of the New York tabloids Warhol devoured. The 6 billion perps -- cop slang for the "perpetrators" of a crime -- refer to the world's population, and thus the "commonality" of global warming, Wrbican says, and the collective responsibility to confront it.

The show makes pains to take that responsibility seriously. The show guide -- itself in tabloid form -- is printed on recycled newsprint with soy inks and intended as a sort of take-home study guide. A mixed-media installation by Pittsburgh artists Steffi Domike, Suzy Meyer and Ann Rosenthal on the effects of food delivery on carbon emissions offers take-home menus for finding locally produced meals. Many works offer documentation for their environmental claims.

Other exhibits include works by Carnegie Mellon professor Bob Bingham, New England's Jay Critchley, former Pittsburgher Greg Kwiatek, Cal-Berkeley Ph.D. student and artist Trevor Paglen, Slovenia's Marjetica Potr (who did a Pittsburgh-based work), and air quality devices by Preemptive Media. San Francisco's Hugo Kobayashi, a former comic strip artist, completed his melting ice cream cone and iceberg painting, called "Level Four and Rising," for the show.

One room of the exhibition is full of Warhol's own works on car crashes, endangered animals and plants, and the black-on-black "Seismograph," which the museum has never displayed.

Warhol "was always interested in the environment," Wrbican, the museum's archivist, says. "Seeing global warming as the big disaster coming on the horizon, if not sooner, made an instant link to Warhol's disaster paintings."

The show is part of centennial year events for Rachel Carson, the Springdale-native ecologist and writer.