(NEXSTAR) – There’s a “greater than 90% chance” the El Niño,which developed unusually early this year,will last through winter in early 2024, National Weather Service forecasters said Thursday.
El Niño is expected to continue strengthening until itreaches its peak sometime in winter. That’s when the climate pattern can have the biggest effects on weather around the country.
El Niño has different impacts depending on where you live. The southern third to half of the United States, including California, is likely to be wetter this winter. (Exactly where that dividing line falls varies from year to year.)El Niño officially arrives early: What it means for 2023 weather
Meanwhile, the Pacific Northwest and parts of the Ohio Valley tend to be dry and warm.
The goal could make or break Biden’s pledge to slash the country’s planet-warming emissions in half by 2030. And if successful, 100% clean electricity could energize vast sectors of the US economy:electric vehicles, home and officeheating and cooling, and appliances. It could even power heavy industry and manufacturing, which is currently reliant on fossil fuels.
“When you have a fully clean grid, versus a grid that either is a quarter or a half clean, that makes…
Experts call for more nuance in how people view orcas
Experts call for more nuance in how people view orcas
A spate of recent encounters with orcas have brought a frenzy of attention to the massive marine predators.
LONDON — A cruise line has apologized to over 1,000 of its passengers after one of their ships arrived at port in the middle of a whale hunt where dozens of the marine mammals were being slaughtered.
Ambassador Cruise Lines confirmed on Thursday that the arrival of their ship Ambition in Torshavn in the Faroe Islands — located between Scotland, Iceland and Norway in the North Atlantic — “coincided with the culmination of a hunt of 40+ pilot whales in the port area,” according to the cruise line.MORE: Dolphin hunting season begins again in Japanese cove made famous by bloody documentary
Faroe Islands, Torshavn, April 12, 2023.Picture Alliance/dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images, FILE
“We were incredibly disappointed that this hunt occurred at the time that our ship was in port. We strongly object to this outdated practice, and have been working with our partner, ORCA, a charity dedicated to studying and protecting whales, dolphins and porpoises in UK and European waters, to encourage change since 2021,” Ambassador said following the arrival of their ship in the Torshavn port area on the southern part of the main island.
“As has been the case for centuries, whaling still occurs in the Faroe Islands today,” a statement from the government of the estimated 53,000 people on the island said explaining the values of the whaling hunt. “The Faroese have eaten pilot whale meat and blubber since they first settled the islands over a millenia ago. Today, as in times past, the whale drive is a community activity open to all, while also well organised on a community level and regulated by national laws.”
In their apology, Ambassador said that sustainability is one of the cruise line’s “core values” and that the company fully appreciates that “witnessing this local event would have been distressing for the majority of guests onboard. Accordingly, we would like to sincerely apologise to them for any undue upset.”MORE: 21-foot killer whale dies after beaching itself on Florida coast
A humpback whale swims and feeds off of Jeffreys Ledge in the Gulf of Maine, near Gloucester, Massachusetts, on May 8, 2023.Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images, FILE
“We are dedicated to supporting ORCA in their endeavours to collect data and to monitor whales and dolphins and we are extremely disappointed that this has happened after weeks of trying to open constructive dialogue with the Faroese government and Visit Faroes on these issues,” Christian Verhounig, Ambassador’s CEO in their statement. “We continue to educate our guests and crew not to buy or eat any whale or dolphin meat and stand against any profiteering from commercial whaling and dolphin hunts.”
But the Faroe Island’s government said that the hunt is part of the island’s sustainability efforts and that “the meat and blubber from the hunt is distributed equally among those who have participated … Hunting and killing methods have been improved to ensure as little harm to the whales as possible. All hunters must now obtain a hunting license in order to kill a whale.”MORE: Sculpture of whale’s tail saves train from plummeting 30 feet off railway platform
People hunt dolphins in Leynar on June 14, 2023. The Faroe Islands has killed more than 500 dolphins since its controversial hunt resumed in May.SEA SHEPHERD UK/AFP via Getty Images
Although pilot whale meat and blubber contains much protein, iron, carnitine and vitamins, the Faroe Islands government said there are concerns that the high levels of mercury and PCBs in the whales can have detrimental health effects and said that “ocean pollution by heavy industries and industrialized agriculture has resulted in the pollution of whales.”
“Records of all pilot whale hunts have been kept since 1584 and the practice is deemed sustainable, as there are an estimated 778,000 whales in the eastern North Atlantic region,” the government continued. “Approximately 100,000 swim close to the Faroe Islands, and the Faroese hunt on average 800 pilot whales annually.”
In 2023 alone, the Faroe Islands has registered 646 whale killings to date, including the 78 on Sunday when the Ambition arrived.
UPPER FREEHOLD − The scheduling of a bear hunt for late this year moved forward this week after the New Jersey Fish and Game Commission approved a new Comprehensive Black Bear Management Plan which recommends a managed hunt.
At its meeting at the Assunpink Wildlife Management Area, the commissioners also approved three amendments to the plan which adopt special conditions on the hunt relating to the taking of “cubs” and limits on where a hunter can be in relation to a bait pile.
Although the plan was approved by the council, the document needs to be approved before it can be signed. Council members set two dates in August for their next meeting − giving the state more time for administrative approval − for formal signing.
The plan is the same one adopted early in December which allowed…
Have you ever passed by a rock cairn and felt the urge to knock it over? Well, officials with Yosemite National Park strongly advise that you do.
Rock cairns are man-made piles of rock stacked on top of each other.
According to park rangers, Leave No Trace ethics states that when recreating in wilderness spaces, the goal is to leave no signs of human impact on the land so as to respect the other creatures living in it.
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And while the effort and aesthetics of these rock cairns may seem too precious to ruin, oversized cairns are a mark of human impact and are distracting in a wilderness setting.
Push these over, say rangers at Yosemite National Park
Officials also say building them disturbs small insects, reptiles, and microorganisms that live on the underside of these rocks.
In general, park rangers say rock cairns should only be built by trail workers and are meant for navigation, safety, and delineating new or hard-to-follow trails.
Yosemite National Park advises visitors to dismantle and refrain from building rock cairns when visiting the park.
A California man who left most of the carcass of a Wyoming elk he killed go to waste was slapped with more than $6,000 in fines and will lose his privileges to hunt in most of the U.S. for two years.
A California man who let most of the carcass of a Wyoming elk he killed go to waste won’t be able to hunt anywhere in the continental United States or Alaska for two years, and was fined $6,790.
Lewis Cornell of Fullerton, California, recently pleaded guilty in Park County Circuit Court to a charge of waste or abandonment of a big game animal, according to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Fifth Judicial Court Judge Joseph Darrah handed down the sentence.
Wyoming, along with every other state except Hawaii, is part of the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact. Under the compact, hunters…
Gray whales frequently approach boats and let humans touch them in the lagoons of Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula.
Gray whales were hunted to the brink of extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries.
They were known to fight back when harpooned, even damaging boats, earning the nickname “devil fish.”
Now gray whales in Baja California frequently interact with humans in a remarkable shift.
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Gray whales put up such a fight against whalers and their boats they earned the nickname “devil fish.” Today, in the same places where the whales were hunted to the brink of extinction just decades ago, they swim right up to boats, enchanting and even befriending the people in them.
One of those remarkable encounters was captured in March in the Ojo de Liebre, a lagoon in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. The video showed a gray whale right beside a boat, allowing the captain to pick whale lice off its head.
Although some thought the whale was purposefully going to the captain for help with the whale lice — which are actually crustaceans, not insects — experts told Insider that’s probably not the case.
Still, the fact that the gray whales of the Baja lagoons interact with boats and humans at all baffles researchers.
“This is what’s so strange. They were hunted almost to extinction,” Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia, told Insider. “You would think being near a person in a boat is the last thing the few remaining gray whales would’ve ever done and they would’ve had this disposition to avoid them at all costs, the few that survived.”
Gray whales were hunted close to extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries by commercial whaling. During that time, the whales developed a reputation for fiercely fighting back when harpooned, even attacking and damaging whaling boats.
They were also specifically hunted in the warm, shallow lagoons of Baja, where the famous migrators spend their winters birthing and nursing their calves. The gray whales then make the longest migration of any mammal, with most traveling more than 10,000 miles to their foraging grounds near Alaska.
After international conservation regulations were enacted in the 1930s and 40s, gray whale numbers bounced back. There are now believed to be 14,526 North Pacific gray whales, down from an estimate of 27,000 in 2016 due to an Unusual Mortality Event that started in 2019. Hunting gray whales is illegal, with some exceptions for Indigenous peoples in Alaska, Canada, and Mexico.
But the fact that the recovered whales are not only unbothered by humans and boats, but actively seek out encounters with them, remains a mystery. Trites said it’s possible the whales simply have short memories, or that it could just be the shift in circumstances, that the whales are approaching people on their own terms.
Trites said he’s witnessed the encounters in the lagoons of Baja several times and that he’s always amazed by it, especially by the fact that the whales are initiating it.
“The whale turns on its side, looks you in the eye. It clearly is very curious about people,” he said. “It isn’t people running up to whales, it’s whales coming to people.”
A whale watcher touches a gray whale at Ojo de Liebre Lagoon in Guerrero Negro, Baja California Sur state, Mexico on March 27, 2021.
Another confounding aspect of the behavior is that the whales seem to only do this when they’re in Baja, and generally don’t continue the behavior during their migration up the West Coast or while they’re in their foraging grounds.
Leigh Torres, a marine ecologist and professor at Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute, studies a population of gray whales that forage off the Pacific Northwest coast. When she was visiting a Baja lagoon in March, she happened to see one of the whales she frequently studies off of Oregon.
“The whale behaved completely differently down there,” Torres told Insider.
It’s unclear why the whales exhibit the behavior in the first place, let alone why they only do it in Baja. But Trites and Torres both said it could have to do with their priorities. When the whales are foraging, they eat enough in order to fast for the four to six months they are in Baja.
“I think when they’re here they’re just super focused on feeding and don’t have the luxury, let’s say, of expending energy and time to interact with the boats,” Torres said.
Trites speculated it’s possible whales just get a little bored in the lagoons. He said it’s also possible the whales are playing when they approach boats, or that they get some sort of tactile pleasure from the interactions, such as the captain picking off whale lice.
It may just be out of curiosity too, he said, that “to see people and things around them enriches their day.”
[1/2]Ukrainian military serviceman Igor Ovcharruck holds a defused cluster bomb from an MSLR missile, among a display of pieces of rockets used by Russian army, that a Ukrainian munitions expert said did not explode on impact, in the region of Kharkiv, Ukraine, October 21, 2022. REUTERS/Clodagh…Read more
KYIV, July 13 (Reuters) – Ukraine has received cluster munitions, a military spokesperson said on Thursday, less than a week after the United States announced it would transfer such munitions to Ukrainian forces.
Valeryi Shershen, a spokesman for the Tavria military command in southern Ukraine, confirmed a CNN report citing the commander of the Tavria forces as saying Ukraine had just received cluster munitions but had not used them yet.
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Cluster munitions are “in the hands of our defence forces,” Shershen told Ukrainian television…
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials have approved the first over-the-counter birth control pill, which will let American women and girls buy contraceptive medication from the same aisle as aspirin and eyedrops.
The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday it cleared Perrigo’sonce-a-day Opillto be sold without a prescription, making it the first such medication to be moved out from behind the pharmacy counter. The company won’t start shipping the pill until early next year, and there will be no age restrictions on sales.
Hormone-based pills have long been the most common form of birth control in the U.S., used by tens of millions of women since the 1960s. Until now, all of them required a prescription.
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Medical societies and women’s health groups havepushed for wider access, noting that an estimated 45%…
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Exposing the Big Game 
