NEWSBYERIK VANCE

Our very own Erik Vance has teamed up with illustrator Damon Guthrie to produce a first-of-its-kind illustrated history of man's discovery of the climate. Meet the solitary geniuses and bizarre dilettantes who led us, by fits and starts, to our modern understanding of the Earth's weather systems.

Click here for a full-size version.

Damon Guthrie is an artist based out of Berkeley, California. His art can be seen at sameteam.us.

Our very own Erik Vance has teamed up with illustrator Damon Guthrie to produce a first-of-its-kind illustrated history of man's discovery of the climate. Meet the solitary geniuses and bizarre dilettantes who led us, by fits and starts, to our modern understanding of the Earth's weather systems.

Click here for a full-size version.

Damon Guthrie is an artist based out of Berkeley, California. His art can be seen at sameteam.us.

Our very own Erik Vance has teamed up with illustrator Damon Guthrie to produce a first-of-its-kind illustrated history of man's discovery of the climate. Meet the solitary geniuses and bizarre dilettantes who led us, by fits and starts, to our modern understanding of the Earth's weather systems.

Click here for a full-size version.

Damon Guthrie is an artist based out of Berkeley, California. His art can be seen at sameteam.us.

Our very own Erik Vance has teamed up with illustrator Damon Guthrie to produce a first-of-its-kind illustrated history of man's discovery of the climate. Meet the solitary geniuses and bizarre dilettantes who led us, by fits and starts, to our modern understanding of the Earth's weather systems.

Click here for a full-size version.

Damon Guthrie is an artist based out of Berkeley, California. His art can be seen at sameteam.us.

Every great biological discovery relies in some part on the animal kingdom. Hippocrates - that inventor of medicine and catchy oaths - used pigs to model the innards humans. Mendel had his pea plants and Fleming had his penicillin molds.

As for tomorrow's great cancer breakthrough ... well, how about Flipper?

Thanks to recent research out of the University of Florida, there is a new reason to take interest in dolphins and porpoises. Dolphins, it seems are the only other animals beyond humans that can contract multiple-type genital papillomavirus. That's the virus that can lead to cervical cancer in women. Other, more lab-friendly, animals can get HPV, but not the multiple-type that plagues humans.

The topic for this year's American Association for the Advancement for Science Annual Conference was "Science and Society," but it just as well could have been "Science Getting the Crap Beaten Out of It by Society and Not Understanding Why."

For those who do not know the AAAS, it's like an American version of the Royal Society - where Newton and Darwin once discussed ideas among learned colleagues. But instead of smoke-filled rooms and brandy they have Power Point and stale danishes.

Every year, the AAAS meets to share the important science being done around the country. It's a chance to catch up on astronomy, medicine, and geology while hobnobbing with the press. This year, however, the meeting was dominated by climate scientists scratching their heads and trying to figure out what is going wrong.

I am going to use this post to coin a new term in science. Are you ready? It's called the "if/since moment."

The if/since is analogous to the "Eureka moment" but generally comes long afterward and may be kind of fuzzy as to the exact moment. People talk a good deal about eureka moments, but I would argue it's the if/since that is really transformative. The if/since is like the scientific tipping point, only with a very specific set of ramifications. It's the beginning of the end of a scientific debate.

Yet again, Jon Stewart has led the way in "How to Talk to the Public 101." Only this time, he is stepping into my world - science communication.

Well, I guess I should say welcome to the club, Jon. Just do me a favor and wipe your boots before you come in, we just had the rugs cleaned.

This is a bizarre but fitting follow-up to my previous post about weather forecasters (fans of the Daily Show will notice an ironic link between this post and the title of that post). Stewart is doing what it seems no one else is - showing the difference between weather and climate. Sure it's cold now. It was cold in the early 1970's too. But the overall trend is warming. This is just a well-appreciated break from the heat.

As a side note, I appreciate Jason Jones on the program exposing a phenomena totally ignored by the media: "Global Darkening." I had no idea this even existed. I got on Wikipedia and discovered this is a global problem. Did you know that for over half the day in parts of the world nobody can see anything at all? And it's getting worse! In Australia they tell me that these dark periods had ebbed until December but are now on the rise.

God help us all. Here's the clip:

On of the pillars of the case for the case for acting climate change in policy circles is that the science on the subject is settled and the scientists are all in basic agreement.

It's the argument the coal and oil industry has had the toughest time refuting despite mighty and repeated attempts. In fact, most skepticism has now moved from claiming the climate isn't changing to claiming that human activity isn't causing the change.

Anyone who has ever written about climate change has, however, almost certainly received at least 10 lists pointing to "real scientists" who oppose climate change.

Every now and again I look up a few and find out who they are. Now, I'm the first to say that all the science around climate change is not settled. It's just that the overriding principles are irrefutable (more CO2=more heat eventually) and it's hard to find a reasonable denier at climate conferences.

And not everybody who opposes major tenets of prevailing climate theories is either corrupt or a total nutcase. Just, you know, a lot of them. Here are my four favorites, so far.

Blame it on a childhood steeped in The Muppet Show and the New York Times, but I have frogs on the brain for the second week in a row.

NYT's Cornelia Dean wrote a fascinating story arguing where frogs may herald yet another disturbing trend in conservation biology. Increasingly, scientists are talking about ways to take entire populations of animals out of the wild and put them in zoos to avoid extinction. In this case, it's the tiny spray toads of Tanzania. The problem was that the little guys had a minute range that fell smack in the middle of a planned hydroelectric dam.