So it looks like it's not all gloom and doom after all. A few recent studies have managed to find the slim silver lining of climate change. Below, a look at the three small positive outcomes of global warming.

The Brits are murdering pigeons. Unable to prevent the pests from pooping on the stuffy spectators and sweater-vested tennis players at the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (aka Wimbledon), officials have hired marksmen and instructed them to shoot to kill. Previous attempts to control the pigeons by releasing hawks were unsuccessful. PETA argues that shooting the birds is "cruel and illegal."

Widely recognized as the most important sea bird habitat on Earth, Gough Island is a geographically perfect place for the animals to raise their young. It is one of the most remote places in the South Atlantic, nearly 2000 miles from both Africa and South America and 220 miles from the next nearest island in its archipelago. It is this isolation which has allowed its ecosystem to remain a nearly perfect home for the 22 bird species that seek its shelter in order to breed.

Confirming what had been a long-held hypothesis among paleontologists, scientists have now verified at the molecular level that the closest living relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex are indeed birds; most specifically ostriches and chickens. Skeletal evidence has strongly borne this theory out in recent years as data from fossils has accumulated, but this new study of bone proteins definitively shows that more of the T. rex genome is similar to birds' than to living reptiles'.

If you feed the neighborhood stray cat, he'll keep coming back. He'll remember your house as an easy source of food and won't have to scavenge for as much garbage or chase down as many field mice. The same thing obviously applies to birds and bird feeders, just on a much larger scale. At that point—when hundreds of thousands, even millions of feeders are involved—what kind of effect does the feeding have on the animals' natural ecosystem? That's the question Gillian Robb and her team at Queen's University Belfast in the U.K. set out to answer through an experiment of their own and a review of the existing literature.

As our population expands further into the reaches of animal habitats, scientists work to understand how and whether those animals can cope with human urbanization. One of the prevailing assumptions about migratory birds in cities was that they didnt do as well as their rural relatives because the threats were greater—more cats stealing eggs and killing fledglings. That turns out not to be the case, according to the results of a new study published by professors at Ohio State University. The culprit, they found, may be simply that the birds dont like living in cities.