"60 Minutes" just aired a repeat of a report they had featured earlier, about global warming and its effect on the arctic polar bear population.

Because of the rise in the earth's temperature all over the world, including the North and South polar regions, ice floes are melting earlier each year. Unfortunately, this is having a very bad impact on the polar bear population, because it significantly shortens the bears' feeding season.

The bears climb onto the ice floes and use them as bases to hunt their chief source of food, which is seals. No ice floes, no ability to hunt, no ability to feed. The polar bear population has declined significantly in the past twenty-five years, and the weight of female bears has also declined, a fact that zoologists fear represents declining fertility and a much lessened ability to carry a pregnancy to term.

Polar bears are threatened with extinction; but there seems to be a potential solution that, while not having any impact on the core problem of global warming, could offer a stop-gap solution while we work on reversing the larger problem.

Why not design artificial ice floes and fly them into the arctic zone, so that the polar bears can climb up on them and use them to continue their hunt for food? Its seems like it would be fairly easy to do, it would not be that expensive, and it might buy the polar bear population a few precious years of survival while we figure out how to restore their environment to its former state.

Wildlife and other environmental groups need to jump on this as a priority and fix the situation, fast. The alternative is to lose, forever, a precious part of our world - the arctic polar bear, another species lost to man's insensitive manipulation of our natural world.