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The article presents a study that observes the Pliocene climate using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in the U.S. It details the process of the research that investigates new simulations of the Pliocene using the AR5/CMIP5 version of the GISS Earth System Model known as ModelE2-R. The result of the study shows that the model provides accurate projection of future climate.

The article presents a study which explores the experimental design of Experiment 2 of the Pliocene Model Intercomparison Project (PlioMIP). Experiment 2 utilizes coupled ocean-atmosphere climate models with the boundary condition data sets of U.S. Geological Survey's Pliocene Research Interpretation and Synoptic Mapping (PRISM Group). Comparisons of the experimental design and boundary conditions between Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 are highlighted.

In order to predict the fate of biodiversity in a rapidly changing world, we must first understand how species adapt to new environmental conditions. The long-term evolutionary dynamics of species' physiological tolerances to differing climatic regimes remain obscure. Here, we unite palaeontological and neontological data to analyse whether species' environmental tolerances remain stable across 3 Myr of profound climatic changes using 10 phylogenetically, ecologically and developmentally diverse mollusc species from the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains, USA. We additionally investigate whether these species' upper and lower thermal tolerances are constrained across this interval. We find that these species' environmental preferences are stable across the duration of their lifetimes, even when faced with significant environmental perturbations. The results suggest that species will respond to current and future warming either by altering distributions to track suitable habitat or, if the pace of change is too rapid, by going extinct. Our findings also support methods that project species' present-day environmental requirements to future climatic landscapes to assess conservation risks., (© 2014 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.)