The Interior Department can no longer postpone the decision on whether to list the polar bear as an endangered species, a federal judge ruled on Monday, giving the government until May 15 to announce a decision.

The Fish and Wildlife Service took all the time in the world to make a decision, repeatedly failing to meet deadlines, and apparently ignoring all requests to do something before it is too late. As the agency struggles with the papers, as Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services explained earlier this year, the polar bear doesn’t have that much time.

“Defendants have been in violation of the law requiring them to publish the listing determination for nearly 120 days,” the court decision says. “Other than the general complexity of finalizing the rule, Defendants offer no specific facts that would justify the delay, much less further delay.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, together with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace decided to sue the Bush administration for all the delays on the polar bear decision on March 10, and filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

The Fish and Wildlife Services was asked to review the polar bears’ situation three years ago, and ever since then it’s been nothing but delays and hard to believe explanations.

“The bottom line is the Fish and Wildlife Service has been twiddling its thumbs as the polar bear habitat has been melting,” Andrew Wetzler, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Endangered Species Program told Bloomberg last month. “They have repeatedly missed deadlines they are more than capable of meeting.”

Scientists don’t get tired of publishing studies and reports, raising alarm signals on the effects of global warming on the Arctic sea ice and the disastrous impact on the animal life there, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services did take their time in making a decision, being more concerned about “making it clear and why”, as Dale Hall said, rather than protecting the polar bears.