Here's a seriously depressing question:

If a polar bear no longer has ice to stand on and must have his "bear kibble" (that's a real term; more on it soon) airlifted to the Arctic by helicopter, is he still a polar bear? Or is he some sort of zoo-like experiment -- a sad but perhaps unavoidable consequence of an era of melting ice and warming climates?

I posed a less-wordy version of that question to Andrew Derocher, a biologist and polar bear expert at the University of Alberta. He recently published a paper outlining several emergency actions that likely will have to be taken soon to save the Arctic bears.

Among Derocher's scenarios is using helicopters to airdrop food on polar bears as their icy habitat continues to melt -- at a cost of $32,000 per day for the "most accessible" bears. (The hope is that such interventions would last days per year, not months).

"It's a lot better to have some animals in the wild even if they are being supplemented in their food. If we were basically the sole food source for these animals, then we're going to have some very serious issues. Then it won't really be a polar bear anymore," Derocher said on the phone. "It will be a semi-wild, semi-captive, free-ranging carnivore. And it probably wouldn't do that well even if the ice started to come back" since the bear would become so dependent on the airlifted food that he may forget how to hunt.

(Sigh). It's really come to this.

Derocher's paper, which appeared in the journal Conservation Letters, has been getting lots of attention because it outlines several last-ditch ideas for saving the polar bears, including feeding them bear chow, which, as one commercial website describes it, contains "ground corn, porcine meat meal, fish meal (menhaden), dehulled soybean meal, corn gluten meal, ground soybean hulls, porcine animal fat preserved with BHA, dried beet pulp, soybean oil, taurine, salt" and a bunch of stuff I can't pronounce. It's packaged sort of like cat food.

His other ideas: Moving the bears northward, where the ice is less likely to melt; euthanizing some of the bears, which he writes "may be the most humane option for individual bears in very poor condition that are unlikely to survive"; and moving some of the polar bears to zoos.

None of those options is easy to stomach -- and not just because of the "porcine meat meal." Derocher knows that. He doesn't want to have to feed the polar bears, much less euthanize them. After 30 years of researching the Arctic bears, he's just being realistic.

As the planet warms, thanks to our gas-guzzling cars and power-producing factories, the polar bear's frozen habitat is disappearing. Arctic sea ice has been declining at a rate of 13% per decade since 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Many scientists expect summer sea ice to disappear in a matter of decades. Polar bears live and hunt from sea ice. If it's gone, they can't catch seals, which tend to stay far from land. And if the bears can't catch seals, they can't survive. There's no other way around it.

Unless, maybe, you airdrop some food on them.

But even then, something of the bear's essence is lost.

"It's ridiculous, human beings feeding polar bears. Polar bears are wild animals," James Eetoolook, vice president of an Inuit group in Canada's Nunavut told The Canadian Press. "They're predators. They're hunters. Let them be."

"I wouldn't say I'm 'against' it, just skeptical about how much good it will do to them," one commenter wrote on my Google+ page when I asked about the subject. "I'm afraid that in our haste to do good we might do more harm in the long run."

It's easy to have a whiplash reaction: Don't feed the polar bears. It's very Yogi, as Derocher put it. But such plans, while tragic, may be unavoidable at this point.

The fact that such an idea is even up for consideration should be a major wake-up call -- a reminder that climate change is real and happening now. While some of its effects are inevitable (some polar bear habitat absolutely will be lost, Derocher said), there are longer-term solutions that could help save some of the polar-bear-ness of the polar bear. Or at the very least, Derocher said, they're ideas that could save them from extinction.

The solutions are all things you've heard before: cut carbon dioxide emissions, use less power, walk don't drive, live more efficiently.

It's not rocket science (or, as one Twitter user recently suggested as a replacement for that phrase, "it's not corporate income-tax law"), but it will take a huge amount of political will in the United States and elsewhere to make substantive changes.

That seems to exist. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called for action on climate change "for the sake of our children and our future." Some 35,000 people gathered in Washington last weekend to make similar points. Organizers said it was the largest demonstration of its kind in the United States.

Meanwhile, none of the five countries with polar bears -- the United States, Norway, Russia, Canada or Greenland -- has a plan for responding to polar bear emergencies "caused by nutritional stress," the scientists write in the recent paper, which is titled "Rapid ecosystem change and polar bear conservation."