From Watts Up With That?

Essay by  Eric Worrall

I can’t recall the USA ever stopping foreign scientists from visiting, but apparently that will be a thing in the future.

Why Greenland is indispensable to global climate science

Published: January 10, 2026 4.39am AEDT
Martin Siegert
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Cornwall), University of Exeter

A 30-minute stroll across New York’s Central Park separates Trump Tower from the American Museum of Natural History. If the US president ever found himself inside the museum he could see the Cape York meteorite: a 58-tonne mass of iron taken from northwest Greenland and sold in 1897 by the explorer Robert Peary, with the help of local Inuit guides.

For centuries before Danish colonisation, the people of Greenland had used fragments of the meteorite to make tools and hunting equipment. Peary removed that resource from local control, ultimately selling the meteorite for an amount equivalent to just US$1.5 million today. It was a transaction as one-sided as anything the president may now be contemplating.

But Donald Trump is now eyeing a prize much larger than a meteorite. His advocacy of the US taking control of Greenland, possibly by force, signals a shift from dealmaking to dominance. The scientific cost would be severe. A unilateral US takeover threatens to disrupt the open scientific collaboration that is helping us understand the threat of global sea-level rise.

…

Unlike Antarctica or Svalbard, Greenland has no treaty that explicitly protects access for international scientists. Its openness to research therefore depends not on international law, but on Greenland’s continued political stability and openness – all of which may be threatened by US control.

…Read more: https://theconversation.com/why-greenland-is-indispensable-to-global-climate-science-273064

This has got to be one of the more absurd arguments against a US takeover of Greenland. The USA as far as I know has never stopped climate scientists from visiting US territory, the Trump administration just doesn’t want to pay for climate voodoo.