Actually, you probably did miss the news because most major media outlets didn't cover it in a serious way, if at all. Instead, they and their audiences evidently view such information as far less news-, buzz- and tweet-worthy than (among other things) the opening of George W. Bush's library and President Obama's jokes at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Such an appetite for distraction, no doubt, comes from both those who deny the problem of climate change and those who acknowledge the crisis but nonetheless look away from what feels like an unsolvable mess.

That sense of hopelessness is understandable. After all, some of the most hyped ways to reduce carbon emissions -- electric cars, mass-scale renewable energy power plants, etc. -- require the kind of technological transformations that can seem impossibly unrealistic at a time when Congress can't even pass a budget.

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"I would point out that if you're a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn't because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy," Barton said during a Subcommittee on Energy and Power hearing to discuss the Keystone XL pipeline, BuzzFeed reports.

He also said that it doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't believe that the climate is changing: "I think you can have an honest difference of opinion of what's causing that change without automatically being either all in that's all because of mankind or it's all just natural. I think there's a divergence of evidence."

Barton, one of Congress's top recipients of oil company campaign donations, is perhaps best known for apologizing to BP for what he called a White House "shakedown," after the Obama administration announced that it would set up a $20 billion escrow fund to benefit victims of the 2010 BP oil spill.

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And while it's still just a few months in, a look at these important but overshadowed goals, as he outlines his budget, does not suggest much progress -- or urgency.

“I urge this Congress to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago,” Obama thundered in the February speech, in an aggressive plea to address the crisis. “But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future.”

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This is up from 51 percent in 2011.

From the poll:

Public concern about global warming has waxed and waned over the past two decades, ranging between 50% and 72%. The average percentage over time for "worrying a great deal/fair amount" comes in at just under 60%, similar to the March 7-10 reading from Gallup's 2013 Environment poll.

But the poll also finds that 15 percent believe that the effects of global warming will never happen, while 41 percent believe new reports about the subject are exaggerated.

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Which, if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news. Yes, those of us fighting the pipeline have mobilized record numbers of activists: the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years and 40,000 people on the mall in February for the biggest climate rally in American history. Right now, we’re aiming to get a million people to send in public comments about the “environmental review” the State Department is conducting on the feasibility and advisability of building the pipeline.  And there’s good reason to put pressure on.  After all, it’s the same State Department that, as on a previous round of reviews, hired “experts” who had once worked as consultants for TransCanada, the pipeline’s builder.

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That’s the conclusion of a Stanford University research team, which found invoking the idea of interdependence undermined the motivation of European-American students to take a course in environmental sustainability.

The researchers, led by MarYam Hamedani of Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, argue that in mainstream European-American culture, independence functions as a “foundational schema” — that is, an underlying design or blueprint that guides behavior.

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“It was really easy for me to find this evidence, really easy,” said young Alex. “I believe the reason that the liberals do not have the evidence [that it's a hoax] is because they do not want the evidence. They don't want to hear that it's wrong.”

Alex said he found all the information at the library, because he didn't have a computer. Limbaugh was so impressed that he told Alex he wanted to send him an iPad, assuming his parents were OK with it, in order to help him with future research.

Circling back today, Limbaugh explained that "exactly as the news media is a branch of the Democrat Party, so too is much of science today." "The global warming scientists are just Democrats, folks. They're all part of an agenda," he continued, "The Democrats have literally politicized everything they can use to expand government, which is their primary objective."

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So yeah, I’m pretty allergic to poison ivy. But a lot of people are -- 80 percent of the population reacts to the vine with welts and maddeningly itchy rashes. So the fact that poison ivy plants are getting bigger and more poisonous due to climate change isn’t exactly welcome news. But that’s precisely what’s happening; scientific research indicates that with higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the poison ivy plant grows larger, and its “oil” (a.k.a. the awful poisonous stuff) becomes more potent.

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Of course, activists concerned with campaign finance reform and the undue influence of money in politics will not welcome Steyer's pledge. Others might be pleased that the Koch support for climate skeptical policy will have a match. In the parlance appropriate to an aggressive financier, the green capitalist told the Hill that he planned to "destroy" climate skeptics and sought a "smashing victory." Via the Hill:

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A Dutch study published online in the Nature Geoscience journal said that sea ice around Antarctica has expanded at an accelerated rate of 1.9 percent per decade since 1985, unlike that in the Arctic region. It also notes that cool freshwater from melt underneath Antarctic ice shelves has insulated offshore sea ice from the ocean beneath, which is warming.

Because the melt water has a relatively low density, it accumulates in the top layer of the ocean, allowing for the cool surface waters to re-freeze more easily during fall and winter.

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OK, "end of the week" might be a bit premature. Dig down deep on any of these news stories, and you will find a lot more in the way of "proof of concept" than actual 3-D manufactured reality. But it is still regularly amazing how fast the world of 3-D printing is moving. The "new hardware movement" is no joke. Advanced manufacturing technology is fast becoming a tool that can fit into any home or laboratory.

At Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, scientists have figured out how to "print" spheroids made of successive layers of embryonic stem cells using an "ink" that itself consists of stem cells.

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"I'm not as convinced as a lot of people are that man-made climate change is the threat they think it is," Stewart told the Salt Lake Tribune. "I think it is probably not as immediate as some people do."

As Tim Murphy from Mother Jones reports, Stewart is no big fan of the EPA or Endangered Species Act either:

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"Just because I want to define marriage in a traditional way does not make me a bigot," Rubio said, adding: "Just because I believe that life, all life, at all stages of development, deserves to be protected," does not make him closed-minded.

"The people who are closed-minded in our society are the ones who love to preach about climate science" but ignore that "science has proven that life begins at conception."

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Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The nation’s 13th largest metropolitan area (nudging out Detroit) crams 4.3 million people into a low bowl in a hot desert, where horrific heat waves and windstorms visit it regularly. It snuggles next to the nation’s largest nuclear plant and, having exhausted local sources, it depends on an improbable infrastructure to suck water from the distant (and dwindling) Colorado River.

In Phoenix, you don’t ask: What could go wrong? You ask: What couldn’t?

And that’s the point, really. Phoenix’s multiple vulnerabilities, which are plenty daunting taken one by one, have the capacity to magnify one another, like compounding illnesses. In this regard, it’s a quintessentially modern city, a pyramid of complexities requiring large energy inputs to keep the whole apparatus humming. The urban disasters of our time -- New Orleans hit by Katrina, New York City swamped by Sandy -- may arise from single storms, but the damage they do is the result of a chain reaction of failures -- grids going down, levees failing, back-up systems not backing up. As you might expect, academics have come up with a name for such breakdowns: infrastructure failure interdependencies. You wouldn’t want to use it in a poem, but it does catch an emerging theme of our time.

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Now Republicans have a plan to try to recapture the youngest voters out there: Take over the curriculum in public schools, replace education with a bunch of conservative propaganda, and reap the benefits of having a new generation that can’t tell reality from right-wing fantasy.

How well this plan will work is debatable, but in the meantime, these shenanigans present the very real possibility that public school students will graduate without a proper education. To make it worse, many of these attempts to rewrite school curriculum are happening in Texas, which can set the textbook standards for the entire country by simply wielding its power as one of the biggest school textbook markets there is. With that in mind, here’s a list of 11 lies your kid may be in danger of learning in school.

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This year, it appears the agency is moving back toward what ecologists and fire scientists have considered the best practices for almost 40 years now: fires that are sparked in remote wilderness, where they aren’t hurting anyone, should be allowed to burn. That’s because fire, as a natural part of the environment, is good for the ecosystem. Some essential animal and plant species actually thrive in fire-ravaged landscapes, and by thinning out excess timber and clearing out dry underbrush, small forest fires can help prevent large and deadlier blazes in the future.

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First, though, the obvious weather irony: climate change didn’t exactly come out in support of that rally. In the midst of the warmest years and some of the warmest winters on record, the demonstration, which focused on stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline -- it will bring tar-sands oil, some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-richest energy available from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast -- was the coldest I’ve ever attended. I thought I’d lose a few fingers and toes while listening to the hour-plus of speakers, including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island, who were theoretically warming the crowd up for its march around the (other) White House.

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