John Hinderaker examines for the “Power Line” blog the “settled science” surrounding polar bears.

Leftists decided that their global warming scam needed a poster child, and polar bears were selected for that honor. For some years now we have been exposed to mournful photographs of polar bears floating away on ice floes, or otherwise appearing endangered.

The theory on which polar bears are supposed to be endangered because their environment is becoming more benign has never been entirely clear, nor has there been data to support the claim that their populations are declining. Indeed, polar bears inhabit such remote and forbidding regions that no one has much idea how many of them there are. But no matter. Polar bears are cuddly–from a distance, anyway–and so they served the hoaxers’ purpose.

Like so much of the global warming fraud, the polar bear theme has unraveled. Thomas Lifson has the latest. A prominent advocate for the endangered polar bear theory has just admitted to an actual scientist that he made the whole thing up. …

… To anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the Earth’s history, the suggestion that polar bears are threatened by a change in the planet’s average temperature of a degree or two–or five or six, if we pretend that the climateers’ models have any scientific basis–is ludicrous. Polar bears have been around, I suppose, for millions of years. Yet, in just the last 450,000 years–practically the blink of an eye–polar bears have lived through climate changes far more drastic than anything now predicted by the fraudsters.