Global warming alarmists, news media portray arctic beasts as victims and spokesbears, but protecting their thriving population means greatly increased federal power to control our lives.

He’s on the cover of magazines like Time and Vanity Fair and appears on TV regularly as the image of the environmental movement. Now the polar bear could be pounding a path to your door.

Under pressure from environmentalists, the U.S. Department of the Interior must decide by May 15 whether to protect polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. But such protections could mean increased government control over energy and “widespread social and economic impacts” for ordinary Americans.

“The consequences of listing the polar bear will have widespread social and economic impacts without providing any more protection for the bears,” said Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) in an April 2007 news release.

The May 2007 Vanity Fair “green” issue featured the infamous German polar bear Knut with actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio. An April 2006 Time magazine cover showed a bear seemingly stranded on a piece of ice.

A Jan. 20, 2008, global warming special on CBS reported the bears “may be headed toward extinction.” Host Scott Pelley, the same reporter who compared global warming skeptics to Holocaust deniers, reported that researchers are finding polar bears thinner and weaker, with less time to stock up on fat reserves because ice sheets are melting too fast.

“The bears are unlikely to survive as a species if there is a complete loss of ice in summer, which the Arctic study says will happen by the end of the century,” he said.

Pelley featured polar bear researcher Nick Lunn, who reported that the population of bears in the Western Hudson Bay has declined in the last decade, from 1,200 in the mid-1990s to about 1,000 today.

But neither Lunn nor Pelley put the numbers in any context. They didn’t mention that the total polar bear population was estimated at 5,000 in the 1970s; it is closer to 25,000 today. And they didn’t mention studies showing that while the Western Hudson Bay population is seeing some decline, other polar bear populations are stable or even increasing in size.

A 2002 study by the U.S. Geological Survey – the same organization that in September 2007 predicted two-thirds of the polar bear population will be gone by the middle of this century – reported that “populations may now be at historic highs.”

But Pelley and others in the media prefer to repeat climate change alarmists’ claims that polar bears stand to suffer major losses if world governments don’t step in to curb global warming and reverse the melting of sea ice.

ABC’s Sam Champion told “Good Morning America” Feb. 8, 2008, that a two-degree increase in global temperatures would make “polar bears struggling to survive.”

On Nov. 6, 2007, NBC “Today” show co-host Matt Lauer said the bears “are facing an epic struggle for survival.” Reporter Kerry Sanders warned that “If the Arctic ice continues to melt, in the next 100 years, the U.S. Wildlife Service says the only place you’ll find a polar bear on Earth will be at the zoo.”

Kate Snow called polar bears “the newest victims of global warming” on the Sept. 9, 2007, ABC “Good Morning America” broadcast. The same segment featured U.S. Geological Survey scientist Dr. Steven Amstrup saying the bears “could be absent from almost all of their range by the middle of this century.”

Some in the media have even acknowledged they get so caught up in using polar bears as a flashpoint for global warming alarmism that their activism trumps reporting. On March 28, 2008, a National Geographic photographer acknowledged that environmentalists – himself included – misrepresent images of polar bears to further their cause.

“I realize what I need to do is try and tell these stories through National Geographic magazine by using animals such as polar bears to hang this campaign on, to say that if we lose sea ice in the Arctic, and projections are to lose sea ice in the next 20 to 50 years, we ultimately are going to lose polar bears as well,” Paul Milkin said on ABC “Good Morning America.”

Milkin acknowledged that one picture that seemingly shows a polar bear in distress was actually a result of his zeal. “It was just a moment where I was not thinking clearly,” he said. “I was 10 feet away, lying on my belly, and this bear is shaking water. And he was just, he took a lunge at me, basically. But as [it] lunged up and was coming down on me, the ice broke and got away. And my first thought was, I knew I had the shot, so I was really excited that this shot would help tell the story that I want to tell about melting ice.”

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