Trump calls climate change a ‘con job’ but it could drive his bid to seize Greenland |
The wind is howling down the main street of Nuuk on Sunday afternoon, just as the sun sets about 4pm, and it sweeps ice crystals up from the ground and into the faces of the people walking down the street to the supermarket. The official temperature is zero degrees, but the weather report says the 70km/h wind has driven this down to minus 13 on the “feels like” scale. Visitors to Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, shield themselves with thick layers of clothing and lean into the wind as they walk.
You can tell the hardened locals, however, by the way they shrug off the deep freeze without putting as much as a cap or a beanie on their heads. One young mother, bundling two children and a pram onto a bus, lets her long hair fly up like a flag in the wind.
“Make America Go Away”: a baseball cap, distributed for free by Danish artist Jens Martin Skibsted, in Sisimiut, Greenland. Credit: Juliette Pavy/Bloomberg via Getty
This isn’t cold, some of the Greenlanders tell me. They think it is unseasonably warm. By their reckoning, it should be much lower at this time of the year – and not just on the “feels like” measure. The mean temperature in Nuuk in January is minus 7.7 degrees.
At a time when temperatures are soaring in Australia and bushfires are destroying homes and lives, the conditions in Greenland seem like the opposite extreme. The common factor, however, is the concern about the warming planet.
This is another worry for the people of Greenland when US President Donald Trump is making them nervous by talking about taking control of their territory.
“We are going to do something in Greenland, whether they like it or not,” Trump said on Friday. “I would like to make a deal the easy way, but if we don’t do it the........