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The United States Department of Interior decision last week to list polar bears as a "threatened" species is the latest prize claimed by the climate change movement.

Officials based the decision on predictions that future global warming will negatively affect polar bear populations.

What appears to be a recent gain in momentum in the global warming movement is strange considering reports that global temperatures have not risen in the past 10 years. Also, scientists with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict temperatures will cool for at least the next 10 years.

Several experts have been quick to question the polar bear decision, saying it defies scientific evidence.

With the ruling, suggested James M. Taylor, environmental policy expert at the Heartland Institute, "The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has just taken its place alongside Miss Cleo and the Psychic Friends Network in terms of a complete divorce from scientific reality. FWS apparently believes it has the clairvoyance to forecast sharp declines in polar bear populations even though temperatures for most of the past 10,000 years have been warmer than today and polar bears have flourished."

Global polar bear populations have been rising for decades, even as temperatures have recovered from the end of the Little Ice Age 100 years ago, Taylor observed.

He pointed out that "the only plausible basis for ruling polar bears as threatened is blind faith in alarmist computer models that have been no more accurate than Chicken Little's claim that the sky is falling."

Comparing alarmist computer models to the real world, he said global temperatures have not risen at all during the past decade. Before that, for 30 of the preceding years, global temperatures fell. Now even IPCC scientists are predicting global temperatures will cool for at least the next decade.

"Only by completely ignoring real-world scientific evidence and jumping head-first into the world of special interest group propaganda can one justify listing polar bears as a threatened species," Taylor concluded.

Similar indictments of the ruling came from Scott Armstrong, professor at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Robert Ferguson, president of the Science and Public Policy Institute.

Armstrong said the decision "represents a conflict between politics and science. Polar bear populations have been increasing in recent decades, so there is no current problem. The concern is based on forecasts. However, the government forecasts used to support the decision violate basic scientific principles and thus provide no scientific support for the listing."

Ferguson pointed out that Canadians, who manage two-thirds of all polar bear populations, just reviewed their listing status and decided not to up-list the bear to a more serious status.

"Activists are attempting to politically interfere and change that reasonable and informed decision so the U.S. listing would not look extreme, unwarranted, and political, which it is," Ferguson said.

"The listing is lunacy because carbon dioxide emissions - the real target of activists - are surging worldwide, and unless all other countries cut their carbon emissions, atmospheric concentrations will continue to rise even if the entire West shuts down its emissions," he added.

From a standpoint of simple reasoning it is difficult to understand how a species which has been increasing in population for decades can suddenly be determined "threatened" by a climate change that currently seems to be stalled.