1) Although there was record ice growth in 2007 (did you mean 2007 not 2008?) this wasn’t sufficient to bring the total ice levels up to seasonal averages (I don’t know if it was enough to make up for the record melt though).

2) There’s also the question of how thick the melted ice was, and how thick the new ice is. If the old ice was dozens of meters think, and the new ice only a couple meters or less, than that’s quite a difference and the new ice will melt a lot easier in the future.

As to the polar bears themselves the big question is how well can they adapt to the future loss of ice, unfortunately I don’t know enough to answer that.

This is an interesting page, but I’m not sure how it supports your point. It shows that arctic sea ice grew quickly between September and November, when it normally grows, but that in both September and November it was substantially smaller than during comparable periods 1978-2002.

Now, complaining about arctic ice shrinking may, in fact, be bullshit (the fact that the 1978-2002 line is a median, and no data is provided about min/max/std-dev makes this not useful), but you’re abusing the statistics just as badly as anyone else. C’mon, TJIC, be a rational being, not a television pundit!

This seems like the flip side to that. Instead of voters overturning a reasoned decision, politicians are making decisions in spite of available evidence. The articles I read on this suggested that polar bears today are not in any danger, but the Department of the Interior thinks that they may be in danger in the future. That doesn’t seem like a reason to classify a species as “threatened.”

Of course they tried to walk a crazy line on this one, and haven’t satisfied anyone. “Polar bears are on the threatened list because in the future Global Warming may threaten them; but by putting them on this list for this reason we will not try to regulate anything related to Global Warming.”

That just means more seal for the rest of us. mmmmmm, baby seal.