As a climate organizer for almost two decades, I have thought about Greenland over the years.
According to the website AntarcticGlaciers.org, “The Greenland Ice Sheet is one of two continent-scale ice masses on Earth, with the other being the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The Greenland Ice Sheet is the largest ice mass in the Northern Hemisphere…Almost 80% of Greenland’s landmass is covered by the ice sheet.”
A recent NPR article stated that “Greenland is the world’s largest island that is not a continent, covering more than 836,000 square miles.” Greenland about three times bigger than the size of Texas. At its thickest point, the Greenland Ice Sheet measures almost 2 miles thick and contains about 696,000 cubic miles of ice. The Greenland Ice Sheet holds about 10-12% of the world’s glacier ice, making it the second-largest body of ice on Earth after Antarctica.
Greenland first came to my attention in 2006 when I saw Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. In that film, former Vice President Al Gore spoke passionately about the need to address human caused climate change. He ran the alarm bell how fast Greenland’s ice sheet is melting because of burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil, and natural gas. He stated “If (the Greenland ice sheet) melted or broke up and slipped into the sea – or if half of Greenland and half of Antarctica melted or broke up and slipped into the sea, sea levels worldwide would increase by 18 to 20 feet.”
Gore showed striking visual images of the resulting sea level rise with south Florida disappearing, the water in San Francisco Bay greatly expanding, and most of the Netherlands underwater. Furthermore, he had visual images of the impacts on Bangladesh; Calcutta, India; Beijing and Shanghai, China; and lower Manhattan in New York City. I never forgot the gasps in the studio audience in the documentary and the gasps in the movie theatre when I first saw those images.
The movie was a wakeup call. We must do everything we can to act on climate change and stop burning fossil fuels to prevent the loss of the Greenland Ice Sheets and the catastrophic impact it would have on coastal areas worldwide.
After the film, many people, including me, wondered what they could do to use less fossil fuels to tackle climate change. For years after the film was released, many people talked about reducing their individual carbon footprint or emissions they produce. Incidentally, the fossil fuel industry, particularly BP or British Petroleum, that created the concept of the personal carbon footprint. They wanted to shift the attention to make the individual consumer feel guilty for their sole carbon emissions rather than the responsibility of the fossil fuel industry for their role in extracting, selling, distributing, and making the global society overly dependent upon their products. Climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann reports about this BP deflection campaign in his 2021 book, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet.
Since I moved to Portland Oregon in February 2017, I almost exclusively take public transit and do not drive my car to reduce my carbon emissions or footprint. Over the years, many sources, including Columbia University Climate School, reported on ways you can reduce your carbon footprint. One of their 35 tips was to “If you fly for work or pleasure, air travel is probably responsible for the largest part of your carbon footprint. Avoid flying if possible; on shorter trips, driving may emit fewer greenhouse gases.”
That’s good advice to avoid flying if possible, because of all the carbon pollution from commercial airline travel contributing to climate change. Sadly, individual guilt to reduce personal carbon footprints led to carbon shaming or even flight shaming, which is just as bad as fat shaming. Dr. Mann wrote about the problem of carbon shaming in his book, The New Climate War.
Carbon shaming involves carbon advocates shaming others doing activities such as flying in airplanes. In December 2011, I flew from my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to San Francisco, California to attend the American Geophysical Union Conference, one of the largest annual scientific conferences in the world. I went to see climate change presentations from the world’s top climate scientists. Plus, I wanted to meet other climate change communicators and organizers. After the conference, a Facebook friend kept carbon shaming me for taking a commercial flight to this conference. The shaming was so hurtful that I blocked and unfriend this person. His beliefs were extreme because he would not even fly in an airplane to visit his grandchildren.
I will admit that I like to fly commercially. I fly once a year to Washington D.C. to lobby Congressional offices to urge members of Congress to pass strong climate legislation. My wife Tanya and I have lived in Portland, Oregon for nearly 9 years now. However, my elderly parents, her parents, our siblings, and my adult nieces and nephews all live in the St. Louis area. Thus, we fly back to St. Louis about twice a year to visit them.
My wife is Danish American. My mother-in-law is originally from Denmark. My wife likes to fly to Denmark every two to three years to see her aunts, uncles, and cousins. I traveled with my wife to see Denmark 4 times over the last 9 years. I love to see Tanya’s relatives, stay at the family summer house that is on the Baltic Sea, walk around the nearly old Danish towns and small cities, and experience the Danish culture. My wife intended to go to Denmark on these vacations, with or without me. However, she wanted me to go with her, and I love going to Denmark.
The only downside for me is that it is a 9-and-a-half-hour flight from Portland, Oregon to Amsterdam, Netherlands, plus another short flight to Denmark. That is a long time to be couped up like cattle in the economy class of a commercial jet. It is hard to sleep in those very cramped airline seats. Even worse, with the lack of sleep on the airplane, plus the 9-hour time zone difference, the jet lag is brutal once I arrive in Denmark. It takes several days for me to sleep normally. Thus, part of me is great with flying to Denmark every 2 to 3 years.
On the way back from Denmark on April 23, 2019, Tanya I had an early morning flight from Amsterdam to Portland. I lucked out with a window seat on this flight. Most of the time, Tanya and I are seated in the middle section, since they were the only seats available on the transatlantic flights. No clouds were in the sky when we flew that April morning. The video screen in front of my seat had an option of movies and TV shows for me to watch. In addition, it had a flight tracker map to show the airplane route from Amsterdam to Portland. It indicated we would be flying right over the middle of Greenland.
I am not sure if I will have the opportunity to visit Greenland during my lifetime. It does not seem easy to travel to since it does not have any large cities, frequent flights, or other convenient ways to travel there. This might be my only opportunity to see it. I became eager with anticipation as the flight went across the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Then I saw it. This massive sheet of bright white ice everywhere. Greenland looked enormous as the flight took 2 to 3 hours to cross it. The land looked so different than anything I had seen in my life. Just a glistening white ice sheet with rolling deeply snowed rounded mountains rising in between the ice, especially near the coastal areas. The brightness of the ice contrasted greatly with the dark blue sky and Earth’s daytime atmosphere.
It looked like an area that needed to be left alone, even protected as much as possible. It felt premoral, an icy area left over from the last Great Ice Age, also known as the Pleistocene epoch, dating from about 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago.
Greenland gave the impression we don’t want to melt with climate change. Scientists have warned us for decades that melting it could raise global sea levels up to 20 feet if we continue to burn fossil fuels with business as usual for the foreseeable future. Greenland looked like it belonged to no one, but it belongs to all of humanity. It was a sacred part of Planet Earth that I was so lucky to see from a jet airplane window at over 33,000 feet in elevation on that clear sunny day. It’s not a place in January 2026 for President Donald Trump to threaten to invade and conquer just because he can or his excuse of national security.
As I reflect now of that aerial view of Greenland from April 2019, I can’t stop thinking about those memories since Greenland is in the news so much these days. Today, in January 2026, all of us must do what we can to protect Greenland from climate change, honor the sovereignty of indigenous people who have lived there for thousands of years, and refuse to allow it to be conquered by an egomaniac world leader like Donald Trump.
