"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

First, what do we know about the health of polar bear populations?

Note that it encompasses virtually the entire Arctic region.

the Arctic is such a hostile environment that one can conduct polar bear surveys only at certain times of year and in areas close to land masses. Survey results, therefore, may or may not be representative of the population as a whole. This makes establishing the health of existing polar bear populations--the very beginning of our inquiry--difficult.

Polar bears are counted by periodic flyovers of suspected polar bear habitat or by capturing and marking a subpopulation of bears, then using the frequency of recapture as a means to estimate the size of a population. Few subpopulations have been surveyed repeatedly, and the surveys that exist were taken over different years, some dating back to the 1980s. Where even these limited data are unavailable, population estimates are created basically from hearsay