KALAALLIT NUNAAT, THE LAND OF THE PEOPLE

I thought I’d post something entirely different tonight. Something which I came about by accident, but is, at least for me, fascinating.

I was doing a little research whilst on the phone to my mum tonight about how you pronounce the Danish capital city’s name. (It turns out to be Kopen-Hay-Gen... and not Kopen-Ha-Gen, as both my mum and I had thought, but that is beside the point of this post.) A little more research about Denmark brought me to Kalaallit Nunaat, or Greenland, and its recent semi-independence from Denmark.

Internationally, on June 21, 2009, Greenland assumed self-determination with responsibility for self-government of judicial affairs, policing, and natural resources. Also, Greenlanders were recognized as a separate people under unofficial international law. Denmark maintains control of finances, foreign affairs, and defence. It is a step towards full independence from rule from Denmark. The sole official language of Greenland became Greenlandic. I thought that it would be nice if this was happening to Scotland. (Well obviously without Greenlandic becoming our national language.)

The long history of the island can be read in various places on the net, but there is a relatively good article on Wikipedia, but a couple of things were of immense interest to me. Firstly, that the United States of America wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark in 1947. It seems that the States were interested in the position of the country during the cold war. The sum offered was $100,000,000, a fair old amount of money in these days.

The second thing was the photographs I was seeing on the Wiki site and associated pages. I have included a few of them here for your delectation. Of course I had seen pictures of Greenland before, and I was aware of the fact that the Greenlanders did not live in igloos, but my memory is of scattered communities with brightly coloured houses built on rocky slopes. However, the centre of the capital city (the most northern in the world) Nuuk (previously Gothab) was a bit of a surprise to me.

It looks like a lovely place. Seems to me that it would be fun to go there on holiday sometime.

STRUTTING YOUR STUFF ON THE WORLD STAGE WHILE AT HOME THE COUNTRY IS FALLING APART

According to The Times Mr Brown (clearly preparing for a meeting with his disgruntled constituents in the attached picture), is intending to be the first leader to arrive in Copenhagen, as talks there start to lose their momentum and developing nations stage a walk out.

Mr Climate Change Miliband (as opposed to Mr Foreign Miliband), says that it is a sign of how seriously he takes the subject of climate change. Right! So naturally, as we all believe everything Mr C C Miliband says, that must be it.

On the other hand, it could just be that, with an election in the offing, Mr Brown wants to show us “ordinary people” that he is leading the world through yet another catastrophe, thus cementing his status as not just “a” world leader, but “the” world leader.

With speculation rife that he will call a snap election early in the new year (which frankly I doubt), Downing Street might be hoping to use the Copenhagen summit to burnish the Prime Minister's image as a world statesman, especially if he can help to engineer a meaningful accord to tackle global warming, reports The Times.

It may have escaped Mr Brown’s attention, but the great bulk of the British population is suffering badly from the last disaster through which he “led” the world. Many of us don’t really have much time for a conference that has involved thousands of delegates from all over the world flying to Denmark (where the temperatures for this week range between 2 C and -8 C, so not much global warming there). Some of us aren't convinced of the 'man made global change' stuff, and even those who are may be wishing that Mr Brown would commit just some of that great leadership skill that he is determined to show, to sorting out some of the problems that exist in the United Kingdom.

Unemployment is soaring; soldiers are being killed and maimed in an unwinnable war using substandard equipment; postal and travel strikes loom; the national debt is soaring out of control; penioners, the low paid, sick and unemployed people are having to choose between heat and food; the country remains in recession after all the other G20 countries have moved out of it (except Spain, which isn’t in the G20, despite Mr Brown’s protestations to the contrary), etc, etc.

Why don’t politicians see that most of us don’t give a stuff about world statesmen and their prancing around acting like they matter, especially when they don’t?

Clearly Presidents Obama and Hu are the people who can make this thing work, or not. With their massive economies and huge political clout they can influence change. A broke and broken little island of the coast of Europe can’t. My message to Mr Brown is: Get back home and start tackling OUR problems and leave the big boys to sort out real or imagined world issues.

BROWN MAKES A DECISION FOR ME

When it comes to climate change most people don't have the foggiest (get it?)idea. Actually, whether it's climate change or the Lisbon Treaty or whatever, we can't be bothered to read all the stuff, and if we could be we wouldn't understand it.

The weather in Dundee doesn’t seem to have changed THAT much, so empirical observation hasn't done me any good.

For serious consideration then, I would have to read quite a few papers; papers for and papers against, then I would have to weight up the scientific evidence and make a decision based on what I had understood, which would be very little, because I’m not a climatologist or a meteorologist or a geographer or.... well anything like that at all.

So here’s what we do. We rely on other people to tell us how it is. People who are meteorologists or whatever, or maybe even their political “masters”. We still don't really understand it after they explain, but we know that there are some people you trust and some you don't, and some can put forward a convincing argument and some you wouldn’t believe if they correctly told you your name.

Life's too short. I could be burnt to death by the time I've worked it out.

So, I think, I don’t really believe any of them. They all have an agenda and I can’t be bothered to try to analyse the information filtered through their agenda, so I don’t care, and I’m changing nothing.

I mean, if you are not that well off you don’t waste fuel; you don’t sit with the heating full blast and the windows open; you don’t drive around for hours just to waste some petrol at £1.10 a litre. But to be honest, I’m not sifting through my bottles to make sure that only white glass goes in there and green glass here. What if it’s all for nothing? Life’s too short. I could be drowned by the time I get it done.

So, you look around and say, who can I believe? Who knows about this stuff that can advise? And you hear Ed Miliband’s glottal stops on the radio telling you how important it is that Copenhagen succeeds, and you think... Doesn’t he sound just like Tony Blair? Then, just as you stopped feeling nauseous you hear Brown calling doubters “flat earthers”, and that does it!

So clearly Brown is a passionate believer in global warming caused by man and anyone who doesn't agree with him is a "flat earther". So, who do you trust to make a right call? Brown? ....

Well, that’s me decided.