ANWR drilling, anyone?

Are you saying techniques for determining polar bear population have remained unchanged for the past 50 years?

William P. Horn, former Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks in 1985-1988 (responsible for the ESA program) and experience serving on the Board of Environmental Sciences and Toxicology of the National Academy of Sciences, testified today:
"It would be a mistake to list the presently healthy and sustainable polar bear populations as a threatened species under the ESA. Such action will produce a variety of adverse consequences including (1) creating an ESA listing precedent that opens Pandora's Box in the form of other unwarranted listings that will diminish resources available for bona fide wildlife conservation and recovery efforts, (2) setting the stage for new rounds of litigation and judicial activism to turn the ESA into a regulatory monster of unprecedented proportions, and (3) harming existing successful polar bear conservation and management programs ... A decision to list a presently healthy species exhibiting no present trajectory toward endangerment based on large scale hemispheric models forecasting problems 50 years in the future is a radical departure from the language of the ESA. It pushes the decision horizon far into the genuinely unseeable future, is predicated on uncertain intervening events where it is difficult if not impossible to tie those events directly to specific on-the-ground situations, and will likely precipitate the subsequent listing of an array of otherwise healthy species which might also be forecast to face problems a half century or more from now. By stretching the ESA and encompassing under its umbrella an unknown number of such species, finite monetary and staff resources will be further divided and resources diminished and diverted from conservation and recovery of species facing bona fide imminent threats and where FWS is actually capable of conserving such species. That is bad conservation strategy and bad policy."

The above quotes are non-scientific and too general to be considered adequate for policy. I expect better, but not when EPA library information is disregarded in lieu of the 20 year old opinions you are posting. How can anyone make decisions based on bias or nearly FAKED data?

Sticking to President Bush's views, Kempthorne said the Endangered Species Act was "never meant to regulate global climate change."
Kempthorne hammered the sad truth home, saying, "this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting,"..

The FACTS are that ice territories are disappearing, thus without habitat the indigenous animals will either migrate or terminate, probably into extinction. Care to guess which happens faster? So, what I think you may want to seriously examine, rather than the political rhetoric, is the quantifiable evidence that a shrinking habitat concentrates eco-dependency until resources are too limited to share in balance. Thus, too many penguins left alive amid a shorter sardine breeding season causes starvation. The same with polar bears and any other scavengers, predators, migratory or not.