Despite healthy polar bear populations upwards of 20,000 bearsworldwide, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced onDecember 27 the Bush administration's plan to list the polar bear asthreatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Kempthorne's announcement began a 12-month period of public comment and scientific review.

Global Warming Blamed
While acknowledging polar bear populations are not currently indecline, Kempthorne stated in a news release, "we are concerned thatthe polar bears' habitat may literally be melting." If the bear islisted as threatened, it will be the first time a species was placed onthe Endangered Species list based on the threat of global warming.

Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council had previouslysued the Bush administration, attempting to force it to list thespecies at threatened.

Environmental activist groups have offered anecdotal evidence thatfour polar bears drowned while swimming in Alaska's Beaufort Sea, andthat three polar bears attacked and ate other polar bears, allegedlydue to hunger.

In addition, environmentalists contend human activities are causingglobal warming and that such warming will melt most of the ice at theNorth Pole within 50 years. If that happens, they argue, polar bearswill be unable to hunt seals, their preferred prey, without the polarice.

Populations Are Growing
Environmental activists have presented only one academic study thatshows any negative effect of warming temperatures on polar bears. Thatstudy examined only one population of polar bears, in Canada's WesternHudson Bay, and linked the early breakup of ice in the bay to a 21percent decline in the polar bear population.

Other, more comprehensive research suggests the plight of that onepopulation does not reflect the polar bear population trend as a whole.

Since the 1970s, while much of the world was warming, polar bearnumbers increased dramatically, from roughly 5,000 to 25,000 bears, ahigher polar bear population than has existed at any time in thetwentieth century. Scientists believe polar bears thrived in the pastin temperatures even warmer than at present --during the medieval warmperiod 1,000 years ago and during the Holocene Climate Optimum between5,000 and 9,000 years ago.