Perfectly at home in one of the world's most forbidding environments, polar bears spend most of their summers roaming the Arctic on large chunks of floating ice. They drift for hundreds of miles, finding mates, hunting for seals and fattening themselves up for the winter. Without these thick rafts of sea ice, the world's largest bear could not survive. Yet at this moment, the polar bear's Arctic habitat is literally melting away beneath it due to global warming.

Over the past three decades the Arctic ice cap has shrunk by 1 million square miles -- an area six times the size of California. In September 2007, the ice shrank to a level that most scientific models hadn’t predicted would occur until mid-century. Most scientists are now warning that nearly all of the polar bear's summer sea ice could vanish by 2040 -- and some think it could happen by 2012, which would prove catastrophic for the polar bear. Unless we take effective action now, the polar bear could lose 100 percent of its habitat to global warming and become extinct in Alaska by 2050.

Already, more than 25 percent of the world's polar bear populations are in decline -- and evidence of the dire impact of global warming on polar bears continues to mount. That evidence includes polar bear drownings, cannibalism, starvation, reduced cub survival and denning dislocation.

In May 2008, the Bush administration announced that it would protect polar bears as a "threatened species" under the Endangered Species Act. The decision followed a three-year legal battle waged by NRDC, the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace. While the new protection marks a step forward in our long-term fight to save the bear from the ravages of global warming, the administration's plan is full of loopholes for oil companies and other global warming polluters that will leave the bear vulnerable to extinction. As NRDC and our partners head back to court to close those loopholes and save the polar bear, we are mobilizing BioGems Defenders to demand that the Bush administration grant polar bears the full-fledged protections they so desperately need.

Tell the Bush Administration to protect the polar bear and its Arctic habitat.