Three new sea level rise studies published during the past week offer sobering lessons for coastal residents and policy makers, spelling trouble for portions of the East and West Coasts of the U.S.

According to NOAA scientists, the average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during May was 64.3°F, 3.3°F above the long-term average, making it the second warmest May on record. The month's high temperatures also contributed to the warmest spring, warmest year-to-date, and warmest 12-month period the nation has experienced since recordkeeping began in 1895.

Large fires in the western U.S.

The hidden impact of sea-level rise: current projections may be underestimating the consequences of global climate change on habitat loss.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet — one of the world’s major ice sheets, could collapse if global warming continues, scientists have warned after analysing the genetic evidence from an Antarctic octopus.

An international team, led by Dr Jan Strugnell from La Trobe University, has analysed genes of the Turquet’s octopus, which lives in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, the Molecular Ecology journal reported.

University of California, Berkeley, scientists are drilling into ancient sediments at the bottom of Northern California's Clear Lake for clues that could help them better predict how today's plants and animals will adapt to climate change and increasing population.

The lake sediments are among the world's oldest, containing records of biological change stretching back as far as 500,000 years.

Plants are leafing out and flowering sooner each year than predicted by results from controlled environmental warming experiments, according to data from a major new archive of historical observations assembled with the help of a NASA researcher.

Norway on Monday launched the world's largest facility of its kind to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS), the so-far commercially unproven technology that would allow greenhouse gases from power plants to be buried safely underground.

Sauropod dinosaurs could in principle have produced enough of the greenhouse gas methane to warm the climate many millions of years ago, at a time when Earth was warm and wet. That's according to calculations reported in the May 8th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

A modeling study from the European Alps suggests that population declines to be observed during the upcoming decades will probably underestimate the long-term effects of recent climate warming on mountain plants. A European team of ecologists around Stefan Dullinger from the Department of Conservation Biology, Vegetation and Landscape Ecology of the University of Vienna presents a new modeling tool to predict migration of mountain plants which explicitly takes population dynamic processes into account. Their results are published in "Nature Climate Change".