While “economy,” “jobs,” and “family” were the most-used, non-generic words in President Barack Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, according to Mashable, scientific topics got some mention as well. And it got us thinking: How is science doing under Obama’s leadership? And what about the president’s other joint addresses to Congress? What has Obama been saying about science in these speeches, and what actual actions have come out of the sweeping rhetoric? While this is by no means exhaustive, here’s a quick overview.

The national conversation on climate change is far too politicized to be productive; in this environment, the earnest presentation of facts and studies isn’t bringing the reality of rising seas home to people. Advocates who want to be effective have to get a little more creative…like a growing cadre of artists interested in creating portraits of what’s to come, and what we might lose. Here’s just a small sample of some great art projects trying to give people tools to imagine the unthinkable.

“Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” says T.S Eliot. So much reality is forced upon us by the enormity of our manmade global warming that it’s very hard to bear. The world’s leading climate scientists and policy makers are letting themselves say publicly what they’ve long said off-camera: Even the very existence of the human race is threatened. “OPTIMISM FACES GRAVE REALITIES AT CLIMATE SUMMIT” is the all-caps boldface lead headline on the December 1, 2014 New York Times. The second paragraph of the article, setting up the UN’s 20th annual climate summit, held in Lima Peru, reports that uncontrolled global warming could make the world “uninhabitable for humans.”

The canary in the coal mine of climate change may actually be something a little less feathery and a lot more slimy: Amphibians. Many of these creatures have already been in decline due to disease, and climate changes appear to be accelerating the problem. Jason Rohr, a University of South Florida biologist, says that some amphibians are already being forced to shift the timing of their breeding in response to climate change. Salamanders in the Appalachian mountains are shrinking. As climate trends continue, Rohr says we can expect to see amphibians further altering their behavior, moving to new grounds, and expect more overall declines in species.

One of the most difficult things about manmade global warming—for journalists, for policy makers, for anyone trying to think about it—is its immense size. It’s not the elephant in the room but the elephant we’re all inside of. There is hardly an institution or aspect of life that isn’t threatened, if not already affected, by the rapidly rising global temperature. The huge and unprecedented scale of this problem (which nobody meant to happen) is psychologically daunting—“the story too big to cover,” some have called it.

For this reason, good examples of “big picture thinking” by leading scientists may help us at least to get a feeling for how to do it—get our arms around it, accept what a frighteningly “big picture” problem it is, and even identify some fundamental structural elements of this crisis.

And scientists are the heroes of this story.