Indonesia's disaster chief on Thursday defended the country's efforts to fight forest fires that have blanketed Southeast Asia in choking haze, and said he believed rains would arrive within a month to finally douse the blazes.

"Are we able to manage the fires? The answer is clearly a yes... we are not overwhelmed, we can manage it and there is progress," National Disaster Management Agency chief Willem Rampangilei told reporters.

The Philippines pledged on Thursday to cut the archipelago nation's carbon emissions by 70 percent by 2030, pending financial support from developed countries.

President Benigno Aquino approved the country's climate change mitigation and adaptation plan, which is set to be implemented after 2020, spokesman Herminio Coloma said in a statement.

Sea-level rise along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts combined with more frequent and violent storms could increase flooding from the Northeast to Texas by several-hundredfold, according to a new study out Monday.

Over the past century, the East Coast has seen sea-level rise far above the 8-inch global average - up to a foot in much of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, including New York City. It is expected to increase as much as four feet by 2100, mostly due to the melting ice sheets as well as the expansion of the seawater as the oceans warm.

Most people know that global warming spells bad news for polar bears and other creatures that depend on Arctic sea ice. But it could have an unexpected effect on a kind of animal rarely considered in climate change debates: crocodiles.

According to a new study, climate change could lead to a huge population increase and diversification of crocodile species in North America and Europe.

What did Volkswagen do?

The company is said to have been caught cheating on American air pollution tests. Volkswagen installed sophisticated software known as "defeat devices" in the electronic control module of diesel vehicles issued between 2008 and 2015. This software was able to sense when emissions testing was in progress based on the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine's operation and barometric pressure. Once the software picked up on these inputs, it went into a type of "test mode" when the front wheels of the car were on a dynamometer. This allowed emissions controls to run full-tilt during official testing, but emitted 10 to 40 times the legal amount while on the road.

Last month, wildlife photographer Kerstin Langenberger shocked the world when she revealed a horrifying photograph of a severely emaciated polar bear, shot on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. In a Facebook post, she expressed her concerns about the health of the Svalbard polar bears and the ways climate change might be affecting the Arctic. Her photo, visible here, quickly went viral — having been shared more than 50,000 times since then.

So when Langenberger’s photo surfaced, the immediate conclusion for many people was that the starving bear was the victim of warming-induced ice-melt in the Arctic. But while this is possible, experts are cautioning the public not to make the image the new face of climate change just yet. As a recent Live Science article pointed out, that bear’s condition could have been caused by a variety of other factors. And while climate change remains a serious long-term threat to polar bears, immediately blaming global warming for a single bear’s starvation could even be considered misleading, or could obscure some of the other challenges bears face in the short term.

The Arctic is one of the most vulnerable parts of the world when it comes to climate change, and has the potential to contribute some costly climate-related effects, such as sea-level rise from melting glaciers. But one of the biggest emerging talking points in conversations about climate change in the Arctic involves something else — permafrost.

As climate change melts permafrost in the Arctic, huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane are released into the atmosphere, speeding global warming in the process. A new University of Cambridge study shows that by the end of the 22nd century, the global economic toll of those greenhouse gases will total $43 trillion.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that permafrost soils contain roughly 1,700 gigatonnes of carbon locked in frozen organic matter, which has begun to thaw as the globe warms. Until now, there have been no estimates of the economic costs of releasing that carbon into the atmosphere.

The University of Notre Dame will stop burning coal for electricity in response to Pope Francis’ call to action on climate change, the school’s president announced Monday.

The Rev. John I. Jenkins also said Notre Dame will cut its carbon footprint by more than half by 2030.

Thick white smoke from Indonesian slash-and-burn farming enveloped Malaysia's capital and other areas Sunday, triggering school closures for the following day as weeks of choking haze showed no sign of abating.

Pollution readings in Kuala Lumpur soared into the "very unhealthy" territory in the Malaysian government's hourly air-quality index.