Global Warming Threatens Polar Bears, Judge Agrees With Scientists

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge is upholding a decision by government scientists that global warming is threatening the polar bear's survival.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Thursday ruled that a May 2008 decision to place the bear on the endangered species list as threatened because of melting sea ice was rational based on science.

Articles: A Nutshell History of Climate-Change Hysteria

One battleground that soon became the main theater of the war was society's culpability to climate change. But, early on, the conflict was quite different from what it is today. In the 1970s, besides Vietnam, society was sensitized to a worldwide cooling trend. In addition to cover stories in Time, Newsweek, and other popular magazines of the era, the cover of books like The Cooling by Lowell Ponte teased, "Has the next ice age already begun? Can we survive it?" Inside the book, Mr. Ponte notes, "A handful of scientists denied evidence that Earth's climate was cooling until the 1970s, when bizarre weather throughout the world forced them to reconsider their views."