{"id":34900,"date":"2026-03-07T15:47:23","date_gmt":"2026-03-07T15:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/34900\/"},"modified":"2026-03-07T15:47:23","modified_gmt":"2026-03-07T15:47:23","slug":"forget-owning-greenland-the-real-danger-is-its-melting-ice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/34900\/","title":{"rendered":"Forget owning Greenland \u2014 the real danger is its melting ice\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rafe Pomerance, The Upper Limit Project\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Nearly 7 in 10 Americans reject President Donald Trump\u2019s handling of Greenland, according to the\u00a0latest Associated Press poll<\/a> \u2014 a blunt rebuke and sign that voters are paying attention. But they are missing the real danger: Greenland\u2019s melting ice is causing sea-level rise that threatens U.S. coasts.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump called Greenland a national security priority, citing a prevalence of Russian and Chinese ships as the reason in an interview with\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a>. But Greenland\u2019s real threat isn\u2019t sailing offshore. It\u2019s frozen onshore.<\/p>\n

It should be a national priority to protect Greenland and the U.S. from the real threat posed by accelerated melting of Greenland ice sheets. Ice melt is creating\u00a0a wave of insecurity, manifesting not as a foreign invasion, but as rising seas that steadily erode shorelines, destroy infrastructure and erase economic productivity.<\/p>\n

\"PersistentPersistent melt lifted the snow cover from a low-lying area of Greenland\u2019s ice sheet, revealing a rough terrain crossed by meltwater streams. (NASA GSFC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n

In January, Trump said that if he couldn\u2019t acquire Greenland \u201cthe easy way,\u201d he would do it\u00a0\u201cthe hard way.\u201d<\/a> Later, at his World Economic Forum speech, he doubled down, demanding U.S. \u201cownership.\u201d Europe pushed back. Leaders rallied behind Denmark. The backlash was swift \u2014 and global.\u00a0<\/p>\n

After Trump\u2019s speech, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte helped broker an off-ramp. Trump dropped tariff threats and agreed to negotiations he could have secured months earlier \u2014 without rattling a NATO ally or further straining fragile alliances.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If we want to protect U.S. national interests, we don\u2019t need to buy Greenland or seize it. We need to stabilize it. Put bluntly:\u00a0The fate of Greenland is the fate of Miami \u2026 and Tampa, Jacksonville, Pensacola, and dozens of other coastal communities in Florida and around the world.\u00a0The Eastern Seaboard is particularly at risk, and cities like Charleston, New York and Boston are raising the alarms.<\/p>\n

To understand why Greenland matters to a homeowner in Coconut Grove or a port authority worker in Port Canaveral, look to the\u00a02025 Arctic Report Card produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration<\/a>.\u00a0It confirms that we have entered an era of cascading climate impacts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Arctic just experienced its hottest and wettest year in 125 years of record-keeping. Summer sea ice is now sparse, locking the Arctic Ocean into a \u201cnew normal\u201d of extensive open water. We are looking at an ice-free Arctic Ocean summer within the next 25 years.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Greenland\u2019s melt does not raise sea levels evenly. It raises them higher along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. This isn\u2019t just \u201cclimate change.\u201d It is a redistribution of physical risk that targets our most vital economic hubs as melting ice in Greenland becomes sea-level rise on U.S. shores.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet the Trump administration denies this risk outright \u2014 and has withdrawn the United States from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the primary forum for coordinating a global response to this danger.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A security crisis for the American engine<\/p>\n

The conversation about Greenland must move from abstract geopolitics to the streets, subways and balance sheets of all coastal cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Sunny-daySunny-day flooding in Miami during a king tide (B137, CC0<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Miami: The mortgage cliff\u00a0<\/p>\n

South Florida\u2019s real estate market is a $1.3 trillion engine. As sea-level projections shorten the lifespan of coastal property, lenders will stop issuing 30-year mortgages. When financing disappears, values collapse \u2014 not in 2050, but immediately.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0The New York metro area: Wealth at risk\u00a0<\/p>\n

Greater New York represents nearly 10% of the U.S. gross domestic product. It is the global capital of finance, yet it sits on a vulnerable coastline. When markets finally price in the reality of future coastlines, the result will not be a temporary real estate correction, but a permanent evaporation of household wealth \u2014\u00a0trillions of dollars that underpin pensions, municipal finance, and national economic stability.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0Boston: Infrastructure under siege\u00a0<\/p>\n

Boston already experiences more high tide \u201csunny-day\u201d flooding than any other U.S. city. As sea levels rise, what was once an occasional nuisance is becoming routine disruption. Legacy infrastructure \u2014 subways, tunnels, sewage systems \u2014 was built for a stable coastline. Greenland\u2019s melt turns rare storm-driven floods into regular events, threatening systems that took generations to build but minutes to disable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The territorial distraction\u00a0<\/p>\n

Against this backdrop, the fixation on \u201cacquiring\u201d Greenland is a dangerous delusion. Military dominance is irrelevant here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You cannot deter a melting ice sheet. You cannot threaten a tipping point away. You cannot bomb sea-level rise into submission.<\/p>\n

The case for an upper limit<\/p>\n

\"RafeRafe Pomerance<\/p>\n

While the White House chases 19th-century land deals, our coastal cities and states must act to protect themselves from the real 21st-century risks.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Just as the 2015 Paris Agreement set an upper limit on global temperature (1.5 degrees C), our coastal jurisdictions must establish a formal upper limit on sea-level rise. We need to set a firm threshold, since exceeding it would sharply increase costs and jeopardize economic viability.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mayors and governors in Miami, New York and Boston do not need to wait for a federal administration to acknowledge the melting of Arctic ice. They can define what constitutes a safe upper limit to sea-level rise now as a matter of\u00a0responsibility\u00a0for fiscal and physical survival. By codifying what we cannot tolerate, we force a national reckoning: either we stabilize the Greenland ice sheet through aggressive global decarbonization or we accept the steady failure of our coastal economic engines.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The borders that matter most to our national security aren\u2019t drawn in ink on a map. They are carved in ice. And right now, those borders are vanishing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rafe Pomerance served as the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and development from 1993 to 1999, and played a key role in bringing climate change to the policy forefront. In 2014, Pomerance founded Arctic 21, a network focused on communicating the unraveling of the Arctic. Pomerance is a founding member of The Upper Limit Project, an initiative aimed at establishing an upper limit for sea-level rise. Learn more at sealevelrise-upperlimit.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sign up for The Invading Sea newsletter by visiting here<\/a>. To support The Invading Sea, click here<\/a> to make a donation. If you are interested in submitting an opinion piece to The Invading Sea, email Editor Nathan Crabbe<\/a>.\u00a0Banner photo: A man looks at icebergs off the coast of Greenland (iStock image).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Rafe Pomerance, The Upper Limit Project\u00a0 Nearly 7 in 10 Americans reject President Donald Trump\u2019s handling of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34901,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[6167,7984,20297,184,57,11520,20298,1453,20299,11755,20300],"class_list":["post-34900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-greenland","tag-arctic-ocean","tag-boston","tag-coastal-communities","tag-donald-trump","tag-greenland","tag-greenland-ice-sheet","tag-miami","tag-new-york","tag-paris-climate-agreement","tag-sea-level-rise","tag-upper-limit-project"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116188679296515362","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34900\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}