Psst! Wanna sell your island? I give good price

Who says Donald Trump is ignorant about the effects of global warming? Not a bit of it. He’s heard that Greenland has just ‘enjoyed’ its warmest summer since the end of the last Ice Age. The extraordinary July heat wave in Europe extended far into the Arctic, leading to temperatures of 30 degrees being recorded in Thule, high above the Arctic Circle. 12 billion gallons of meltwater a day have been draining off the rapidly dwindling ice cap in Greenland’s interior. And Donald’s heard about it.

Well informed guy that he is, he’s also heard that Greenland is a source of all kinds of mineral wealth; copper, molybdenum and to him perhaps, most importantly, huge coal deposits. He doesn’t care that the rest of the world is moving away from coal as an energy source, that using it is accelerating the retreat of the ice fields that sooner or later, and now it seems sooner, will lead to a catastrophic rise in sea levels. If all the ice melts from Greenland, sea levels will rise by 9 metres. That’s enough to put most of the ports of America, New York, Washington DC, San Francisco and the rest, under water. We used to think melting off Greenland's ice would take hundreds of years. No longer. Already changes are being seen that were not predicted to occur until 2070. As the Yanks like to say, you do the math.

So, no wonder an opportunist like Trump seeks to take Greenland off Denmark’s hands. What would he give for it? A trillion dollars? More? It sounds like a lot, but remember it’s less than a month of America’s GDP. Thank goodness the Danes are a sensible people, and are well aware that as Mark Twain pointed out, land is the one thing they’ve stopped making. So they are not about to let nearly 900,000 square miles of real estate fall into his hands, ice covered or not. Thank God.