Gray whales made a comeback, and now the food is disappearing

It is a brutal arithmetic: a whale can be saved by a harpoon ban only to die from climate change.

Gray whales beat commercial whaling, only to run into a warmer Arctic that is quietly starving them.

Gray whales were one of the great marine mammal recovery stories. Commercial whaling nearly wrecked them, protections helped bring them back, and by 2016, the eastern North Pacific population was estimated at about 27,000 animals.

Now they are in trouble a…