Newport Symposium on Gray Whales Omits One Key Discussion — Climate Change
By Prof. Richard Steiner
This response to a recent article on gray whales appeared in the Lincoln Chronicle on Sept. 11, 2026. Here is the link to the original letter.
To the editor:
The Sept. 10, 2026, Lincoln Chronicle story headlined “Scientists gathering in Newport say gray whales won’t go extinct, but declining numbers are a warning” deserves a response.
The “Range-Wide Gray Whale Science Symposium,” sponsored by Oregon State University and the Marine Mammal Commission, intentionally avoided the most critical policy question before us all – what can we do to help gray whales survive? As scientists convened in Newport to present their research findings on gray whale biology, astonishingly, there was not one item on the agenda directly addressing this critically important policy question.
Pacific gray whales barely survived extermination from commercial whaling in the 19th and 20th centuries, and now they face another human-caused existential threat — climate change. In addition, they face new and accelerating risks from ship strikes, oil spills, seabed mining, undersea noise, continued direct killing, entanglement, harmful algal blooms, pollution, and disturbance in nursery lagoons. The species has never faced such cumulative existential threat.
A year ago, we petitioned the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to relist the Eastern North Pacific gray whale population on the federal Endangered Species Act list.
Calf numbers have remained at historic lows for years, hundreds of adult whales have stranded ashore dead (often emaciated) in the past two years (likely thousands more have died offshore), and the future prognosis for the whales is grim indeed. Arctic sea ice decline reduces the organic matter reaching the seabed, thus reducing the available gray whale prey resource – amphipods — on the seafloor.
The science on this is perfectly clear: As goes Arctic sea ice, so goes the gray whale. And Arctic sea ice will continue its decline throughout this century. The gray whale population should never have been delisted in 1994, and it now needs to be relisted. Yet this singularly important issue was nowhere on the agenda at the Newport meeting.
In response to our August 2025 petition, NOAA acknowledged its legal obligations, and then simply ignored them. The agency ignored its 90-day deadline to issue a preliminary response, as well as its 12-month deadline to publish a final determination. No explanation, just silence. The agency knows it is breaking the law, but this seems to be the administration’s playbook these days.
For the first time in the 60-year history of the endangered species act, the Trump II administration has added no species to the ESA list. Zero. Further, it has gutted the very tools used to implement the act. This administration is ideologically opposed to all environmental protection measures.
On Aug. 25, several conservation organizations (Earth Island’s International Marine Mammal Project, the Center for Biological Diversity, and our organization) sent NOAA a notice of intent to file suit to force a required response to our 2025 listing petition. As the administration has failed to follow the law, we will now have to rely on the courts.
Meanwhile, many scientists have remained conspicuously silent regarding the proposed ESA listing for gray whales. Perhaps they fear retribution from funders, peer pressure, political pushback, reputational risks, whatever. In fact, one symposium speaker ignorantly claimed that: “There’s virtually no chance of gray whales going extinct.” We wish that were true, but it simply isn’t.
In fact, the only whale known to have actually gone extinct in human history is the Atlantic gray whale. It is illogical and dangerous to assume that its closest relative — the Pacific gray whale — is somehow immune to extinction.
The U.N. recently admitted what many have long feared — human civilization is not going to restrain its carbon emissions enough to limit global temperatures to the agreed danger threshold of +1.5 degree C above the pre-industrial levels. In fact, their “best case” scenario is that global temps hit at +1.8 degree C by the end of the century, and then slowly decline sometime later.
Again, that’s the “best case,” which is still catastrophic. If current energy/emissions scenarios continue, we are headed toward a +2.8 degree C world that would be apocalyptic for gray whales, millions of other species, and even H. sapiens itself.
Given this, what then are we to do to help gray whales survive the human-caused climate bottleneck this century?
First, we need to do everything possible to decarbonize the global economy. Every carbon atom left in the ground instead of emitted into the air and ocean will help in the long run.
Beyond this, we need to list the gray whale population as endangered on the federal ESA list, slow ship traffic in whale habitat, reduce coastal pollution, reduce risk of entanglement, prohibit offshore oil drilling and seabed mining, reduce undersea noise, end the gray whale hunt in Russia, and protect the whales from other identified risks.
Unfortunately, these fundamental policy questions were not on the agenda of the Newport symposium. As such, it amounted to little more than just another dry academic gathering.
Editor’s note: Steiner is a marine conservation biologist in Anchorage, retired professor with the University of Alaska School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. He is founder/director of Oasis Earth; advises governments, the U.N., and other stakeholders on marine conservation issues, and did his graduate research in the 1970s at OSU, operating a research vessel out of Depoe Bay studying reef fish ecology.
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Your donations to the International Marine Mammal Project of Earth Island Institute go to protect gray whales from entanglement and ship strikes. We are preparing to sue the Trump administration to list the gray whale as an endangered species, which would open up resources and attention for the plight of the whales. But lawsuits are expensive, especially against the most anti-environmental government in memory. Please give generously. Thank you!
