The UK Telegraph has an interesting story on the declining …errrr… make that booming polar bear population. Full story at the Telegraph here. Newsbusters covers it here and Gateway Pundit follows up here.

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

What about those stranded polar bears that all the news agencies talked about? Newsbusters reported on an Australian TV station that uncovered that story as a hoax two years ago. Story here.

Remember that wonderful picture of stranded polar bears on an ice floe that were used by folks like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore to demonstrate how dire the man-made global warming issue is?

Well, ABC television in Australia, on a show called “Media Watch,” recently debunked the entire issue (video available here, h/t NB member dscott).

It turns out — as NewBuster Jake Gontesky reported on March 20 — the picture was taken in August, “when every year the fringes of the Arctic ice cap melt regardless of the wider effects of global warming.”

The photographer, Australian marine biology student Amanda Byrd, didn’t think the bears were in any jeopardy:

Gateway Pundit adds the following:

Polar bear numbers in Canada have increased in 11 of 13 regions in recent years.
Another report shows that polar bear encounters on the North Slope oil fields have risen to record levels the last two years. The global warming religionists blame the increase in polar bear sightings on shrinking ice flows. So, now the alarmists are blaming manmade global warming on both increased and decreased polar bear populations.
There are 5 times as many polar bears today as there were 50 years ago:

But I guess none of that evidence stopped 8 Republicans from voting in favor of the Cap and Trade bill last Friday. Voted on nearly sight unseen of course as this has become business as usual with legislation under Obama/Pelosi/Reid.