Thursday is the deadline set by a federal judge in Alaska for the Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether the polar bear is a threatened or endangered species.

All the evidence shows the polar bear doesn’t need his help.

Environmental groups petitioned for such a listing and sued when a decision was not forthcoming by the deadline. They claimed that global warming had already diminished polar ice, would continue to do so and doom the estimated 23,000 or so bears to extinction by perhaps 2050.

If the bears were listed, the service would be obliged to designate “critical habitat.” The Endangered Species Act provides that each federal agency would have to ‘insure that any action authorized, funded or carried out by such agency is not likely to jeopardize any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification (our italics) of (critical) habitat of such species.”

The environmentalists, if not the service, could claim that any activity that emitted carbon dioxide, the chief gas causing the supposed warming, could not be authorized, financed or done by a federal agency. The agencies would have to bring the modern world to a crash as no fossil fuels could be burned in power plants, no highways built and so forth throughout the economy.

The plaintiffs’ claims are highly dubious. Polar ice is shrinking, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in October that it was caused not by warming but a shift in wind patterns that pushed more ice out of the Arctic. Another report in January said surface warming in the Arctic was caused by unexplained atmospheric heat transfer from the tropics.

Polar bears have been around for 100,000 years, surviving much warmer temperatures before the last ice age. Population estimates are subject to huge and unknowable uncertainties. Native groups say there are more than there were several decades ago. Environmentalists are pursuing another petition to list a seal species as endangered - one eaten by bears, it seems. If there weren’t so many bears, there’d be more seals.

Canada, on whose territory about two-thirds of the bears live, has refused to classify them as threatened or endangered. The United States should follow suit.  Source

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