Conservation groups sue to broaden polar bear decision

Conservation groups that sued to list polar bears as threatened are back in court, the Associated Press reports, taking aim at what they say is the animals' top threat -- greenhouse gas emissions that have led to the rapid melting of polar bear habitat: sea ice.

The Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council announced today they have challenged administrative actions by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to keep greenhouse gas regulation off the table for a polar bear recovery plan. ...

In response to a court-ordered deadline last week, Kempthorne announced polar bears would be listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act.

But echoing President Bush, he said he would not allow the Endangered Species Act to be "misused" to regulate global climate change.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had not made a "causal connection" between development actions and loss of a polar bear, he said last week. ...

In court filings late Friday that amend their original lawsuit, the conservation groups asked U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken of Oakland to reject Kempthorne's administrative actions and apply endangered species law to polar bears.

Photo: Daniel Maurer / Associated Press

Comments

[Bill]

I'm truly disgusted that this issue continues to gain traction.

The data that Alaska has nearly double the number of polar bears than they did forty years ago is to be ignored because COMPUTER MODELS of what SOME scientists THINK is GOING TO OCCUR indicate that polar bears populations will fall in the future.

Got it.

Remember all that "scientific method" and "analysis of data" stuff you were taught in school?

Nonsense.

Science is now providing politicians with plausible explanations they need to pursue an agenda.

Meanwhile people take what these computer models say will happen forty years from now as gospel, when people know enough not to trust the computer models the same scientists use to try and predict what the weather will be seven days from now.

Can't get the seven day forecast right, but arctic ice conditions forty years from now? Of COURSE they've got that one nailed down PERFECTLY.

[Alice]

As I sit here in 2 sweaters, freezing (I'm in central PA), I am convinced of another agenda behind the global-warming myth. It's a slippery slope towards making large areas of Earth off-limits to humans, then to genocide in order to reduce the population to the elites and just enough flunkies to serve them.