Leading coastal scientists, managers and others will gather Monday for a daylong conference at the Harbor View Hotel looking at the Island’s changing coastline, from shifting sands at Katama to managed retreat at Squibnocket.

Warming and acidifying ocean waters will negatively affect many fish and shellfish stocks in the Northeast in the coming years, a new study has found.

Martha’s Vineyard is a bellwether of climate change, sea level rise and socioeconomic dynamics. It also is a place with both the interest in and commitment to dealing with its effects.

Now is a perfect time for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission to “articulate its mission and reconsider its priorities.” To take it a step further, it is time for the commission to prioritize its planning under the umbrella of climate change.

When I heard about the People’s Climate March in New York city, I just had to go. Now I am a grandmother. I needed to do this for my five grandkids.

More than 200,000 people are expect to converge on Central Park West in New York city on Sunday for the People’s Climate March. At least 22 of them will be from the Vineyard. Buses traveling to the march from Cape Cod are already full with a wait list.

Have you been noticing the reports since Hurricane Sandy, consistently, nearly every week, all over the world — of very extreme weather events and conditions? If you’ve been denying yourself the opportunity to keep up on the details, now would be a good time to break the habit.

As rapid erosion continues to threaten the Gay Head Light, a possible solution emerged this week to help mitigate the situation as the town embarks on a complicated, longer-term project to move the lighthouse.

In following the news coverage of Hurricane Sandy, I was struck by a strange reversal in reporting from before and after the storm. In the days leading up to landfall, the effect of climate change on the likelihood, strength or impacts of the storm was largely ignored; in accounts of the damage post-Sandy, the subject of climate change has been routinely raised.

To anyone who has spent a languid summer afternoon tumbling in the waves on South Beach or watched the earth’s closest star dip into the horizon at Menemsha, the ocean can seem eternal and unchanging. But scientists are increasingly discovering that human activity is transforming what was once thought to be an invulnerable resource. The ocean is getting warmer, more acidic, louder and filled with the detritus of civilization. What effect these changes will have on the ocean’s inhabitants in the decades to come is unclear.