The young whale never had it easy.

Only 1½ years old, the whale struggled to swim nearly from the start. A rope corkscrewed around the base of its fluke in 2022 dug into its skin and made every fin stroke punishing. Researchers knew the whale would eventually die of exhaustion if nothing was done.

When scientists spotted the female whale — dubbed #5120 — in Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts last winter, they wanted to intervene. But bad weather made any attempt at disentangling it impossible.

By this winter, it was too late. Its carcass washed ashore on Martha’s Vineyard last month. That’s when scientists were able to pinpoint where the trouble started.

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Purple markings on the rope around the whale indicated it came from Maine waters, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service, also called NOAA Fisheries. It is the first time a North Atlantic right whale, one of the most endangered marine mammals on Earth, was found dead while entangled in rope from the state’s famed trap pot fishery for lobster and crab.

While the official cause of death is pending further investigation, officials know the whale suffered through much of its short life ensnarled in rope.

“It’s tragic to lose any North Atlantic right whale,” said Heather Pettis, a New England Aquarium research scientist who helped figure out the identity of the dead whale. “But when we lose a female, we know that we’re losing not just her but all of her future reproductive potential.”

The whale’s death is not just a blow to a species barely hanging on by a thread, with only about 70 reproductively active females and about 360 individuals in total left. The discovery is also renewing a bitter fight between whale advocates and Maine lobster fishers over how to save an ocean giant at the precipice of extinction.

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For many marine biologists and ocean activists, the washed-up whale serves as a stark warning to the federal government to do more to regulate the fishing industry and get dangerous ropes out of the water. Though right whales are massive, capable of growing longer than a school bus, they can still become ensnarled in the thick rope used to haul up seafloor traps to catch lobsters and crabs.

“It just shows and confirms what we as scientists have been thinking, that this Maine fishery is a threat to right whales just as much as any other fishery within their habitat,” said Julia Singer, a marine biologist with the advocacy group Oceana.

These whales are on the brink. Now comes climate change — and wind power.

For them, the story of #5120 punctures a long-standing industry talking point: that no right whale has ever been found dead in Maine lobster gear.

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“For several decades now, the Maine lobster industry has been on a campaign of denial,” said Jane Davenport, a senior attorney for the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife.

The Maine lobster fishing industry, meanwhile, sounded a note of sorrow for the loss of the whale. But it said that it is working to reduce the risk of its ropes and that this is the first documented entanglement in Maine gear in two decades.

“We know that entanglement in Maine gear is extremely rare,” the Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) said in a statement. “MLA remains committed to finding a solution to ensure a future for right whales and Maine’s lobster fishery.”

‘It makes it that much more heartbreaking’

In the past, the Maine fishing industry often pointed the finger at Canada’s fishing fleet for the entanglements.

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But often, when a dead whale washes up, it bares scars but no rope. That makes pinpointing the place where it was ensnared impossible.

“Scientists are able to look at the wounds on the whale and see that they had an entanglement,” Singer said. “But the rope itself might have fallen off along the way.”

In 2022, two major seafood guides — Marine Stewardship Council and Seafood Watch — withdrew their stamps of approval from Maine lobster over concerns about the impacts on right whales.

For lobster fishers, the loss of sustainable status has put a business that has faced high fuel costs and low lobster prices in recent years in a further bind.

“We all agree that we must protect the fragile right whale population, but we must do so without endangering human lives or livelihoods in our state,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Gov. Janet Mills (D-Maine) said in a joint statement after the death of #5120.

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The death of the young whale is the third incidence in as many months.

Earlier this winter, a boat hit a newborn calf off the southeastern coast, where the whales give birth. Though they show signs of healing, the deep propeller wounds across its head, mouth and lip are so severe that marine biologists worry they could be fatal. Vessel strikes are another major cause of whale mortality.

Want to save the whales? Reconsider the lobster, some say.

“I have significant concerns about the impact of the injury,” said Pettis, whose colleagues at the New England Aquarium spend years tracking the same whales by boat and plane, learning to tell individuals apart by the natural markings around their head.

“You get to know the animals, and you follow them and track them,” she added. “Then it makes it that much more heartbreaking and harder to see when this sort of event happens.”

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And just this week, another dead whale — also a female, barely a year old — was found belly up off the coast of Georgia. Experts dragged it to shore and found it had skull fractures and other signs of blunt force trauma consistent with a vessel strike, NOAA Fisheries said Friday.

What the government is — and isn’t — doing

In 2022, the Biden administration proposed a new speed limit rule for vessels. But NOAA Fisheries has yet to finalize it. Conservation groups sued the government this month, accusing it of dragging its feet.

Whale advocates also want to see new rules requiring lobster fishers to deploy remote-controlled fishing gear that doesn’t require any rope. Rules on the books mandating the use of ropes with weak links meant to break under a whale’s weight aren’t working, they say.

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But for now, they must wait — even as whales continue to die. In 2022, a bipartisan group of lawmakers from Maine inserted a provision in a federal funding bill to protect lobstermen from any new rope regulations until 2029.

“No question that this is a very unfortunate incident,” Virginia Olsen, political director of the Maine Lobstering Union Local 207, told members in a message after the death of #5120. But she added “it does not change the fact that Congress has stated in law that our fishery is in compliance” with federal law.

Just as I said that, they went down.

Decentralized identity to the rescue.

Companies like BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase and others are doing their best to lobby for the criminalization of the much more eco-friendly Proof of Stake consensus mechanism throughout the cryptoverse. It’s so absurd.

Full text (fuck Bezos and fuck WaPo!)

The rainfall that hit parts of Vermont on Monday had less than a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year, according to federal flood data. And yet, for some residents, it brought a sense of déjà vu — it rivaled the devastation of another so-called 100-year storm, Hurricane Irene, from a dozen years ago.

The chances of two such deluges hitting the Green Mountain State in such a short span? Just 0.6 percent, said Art DeGaetano, a professor at Cornell University and director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Regional Climate Center.

There was more than chance at play, though, as the planet’s steady warming increases how much moisture the air can hold. Climate scientists have for decades predicted that would translate to extreme bursts of rain in places like New England. While other factors contributed to the floods’ destructive impact — Vermont’s mountainous terrain and preceding weeks of rainy weather — it is a likely sign that those forecasts are becoming reality.

“This, to me, is almost as classic a signal of climate change as warm temperatures,” DeGaetano said. “In a warmer world, this is what you would expect.”

Many of the areas inundated by the storms now face far more serious threats than current federal flood maps suggest, according to new data released by the nonprofit First Street Foundation. In Washington County, where Montpelier is, what was once considered a 1-in-100 year storm is now likely to occur about every 63 years. In nearby Orleans County, such events could happen three times as often as currently estimated by federal flood maps.

The intense and widespread rainfall that occurred from Sunday to Monday had less than a 1 percent chance of occurring in that part of the country, according to NOAA. Widespread rainfall totals exceeding 8 inches were reported from the ski resort town of Ludlow to Montpelier, the state capital.

NOAA estimates the likelihood of extreme rainfall based on past rainfall observations, and doesn’t take climate change into account.

The moisture was wrung from a storm system that remained parked over Vermont for hours, if not days, said Lesley-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, the Vermont state climatologist. While the state’s mountainous terrain always provides lift for rainfall — pushing moisture higher into the atmosphere, cooling and condensing it into precipitation — the weather systems that were steering the storm and slowing its movement were also serving to push the moisture skyward, she said.

And the sheer amount of moisture was unusual. Though the system didn’t start as a tropical storm or hurricane like Irene, it was fueled by a “plume” of moisture wafting in from the Atlantic — similar to the “Pineapple Express” storms that pummeled California with tropical rains this winter. Much of the Atlantic is experiencing record warmth, which means more evaporation to fuel heavier rain.

Places such as Montpelier and Ludlow, where flooding hit hardest, demonstrate why heavy rain can be so devastating in Vermont: all of its steep, rocky slopes send water coursing into river valleys, where people live.

Roads were historically built along streams and rivers because of the terrain, and that means when floodwaters surge, damage to transportation infrastructure can be common and severe, Dupigny-Giroux added.

Maybe I’m an idealist but if the UN can unite behind war, why do they have such a hard time uniting behind climate change?

If the UN (or some international group given the authority to punish climate offenses) would enact steep financial penalties for ecological offenses that scale based on the size of the corporation doing the damage, pollutiontion would go away overernight.

For example: If you ship goods on a giant container ship from China, you will pay penalties/fines that scale with the size of your corporation and the size of your carbon footprint.

We should figure out the math behind this: what amount would hurt their profits enough to cause them to stop shipping and move manufacturing to a more sensible location?