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It's an understandable reaction. We don't know for sure yet, but Monday's tornado may turn out to be the worst ever on record. In the larger context of a world in which extreme weather events appear to be increasing in frequency and intensity, it's natural to look for a culprit when confronted with unthinkable carnage.

In the New Yorker, Amy Davidson reflected the same urge, while being careful not to make a direct connection between climate change and tornadoes.

Every extreme weather event these days provokes questions about climate change; that is because, as Elizabeth Kolbert notes in this week’s Comment, the climate has changed extremely. Tornadoes, as it happens, have been an area of some controversy: two years ago saw a spike, but then last year a low. We’ll see; it will be for scientists to sort out how currents and temperatures and other factors fed into this storm. Climate change means, more than all the lines on charts always going in one direction, that the weather rhythms we think we know by heart, and that we’ve built our cities and lives around, are all out of sync.

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That message — plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve — was announced to the people of the world last week.

When this happens in science fiction — 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is the classic — the planet pays attention.  The flying saucer lands; an alien, in this case played by Michael Rennie, emerges; a final warning is issued:  Stop it.  If you don’t, you’re doomed.

Back then, the “it” was violence — the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear midnight.  Last week, it was climate change — greenhouse gases, and the promise of ecological extinction.

“Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears,” ran the headline on the front page lead story in Saturday’s New York Times, with this sub-head: “CO2 at Level Not Seen in Millions of Years, Portending Major Climate Changes.”

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“The fever has hit California’s agricultural heartland particularly hard in recent years, with incidence dramatically increasing in 2010 and 2011,” wrote the AP’s Gosia Wozniacka. “The disease — which is prevalent in arid regions of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America — can be contracted by simply breathing in fungus-laced spores from dust disturbed by wind as well as human or animal activity.”

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Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least 3 million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

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“I hadn’t even heard the term ‘adaptation’ a month ago,” he told me, taking a bite.

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Yogi Berra is credited with having said that “predictions are hard to make, especially about the future.” It’s true, but climate scientists do their best anyway. Computer models can do a pretty good job of simulating real-world events, but they can’t ever replicate them exactly (you’ve probably noticed this firsthand if you’ve ever seen a computer-animated human in motion). Even well-understood phenomena, like the physics of flight, can’t be simulated perfectly, but aeronautical engineers know they can rely on flight simulations because they know how closely their models represent the real world.

Similarly, models of the planet’s climate can’t simulate today’s climate precisely, but they do a good job of approximating it (and they’re getting better, as the models are continually improved and tested). The places where models and reality disagree help point out the areas of uncertainty.

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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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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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“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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Thirty-seven percent of voters, including 58 percent of Republicans, believe that global warming in a hoax. Six percent believe Osama bin Laden is still alive, while 13 percent think Barack Obama is the antichrist (including 22 percent of Romney voters). Five percent believe Paul McCartney actually died in 1966.

Perhaps the weirdest: 4 percent say "they believe 'lizard people' control our societies by gaining political power."

More from the survey:

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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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In a continuing partnership with Salon, the editors of The I Files are highlighting our picks for the best investigative videos that illustrate and illuminate what's happening in the world.

For more stories like these, please take a moment to subscribe to The I Files channel, YouTube’s one-stop news source. You’ll get a first look at the best videos from all of the major news outlets and select independent producers without the hassle of having to sift through the YouTube clutter. Subscribing is free and causes no damage to the environment.

“Sexual Assault in Tahrir Square,” Bridgette Auger for GlobalPost

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As far back as 2008 NASA’s James Hansen argued that we had crossed a “tipping point” in the Arctic with regard to summer sea ice. The diminishing ice cover had moved past a critical threshold, and from then on levels would drop precipitously toward zero, with little hope of recovery. Other experts now say that recent years have confirmed that particular cliff-fall, and the September 2012 record minimum—an astonishing 18 percent lower than 2007’s previous record—was likely no fluke.

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