As feverish efforts intensify among global leaders to transfer money other than their own to and fro among each on an unfeasibly mammoth scale, back on earth some patterns are emerging.

Which help explain why Greenland was not called, for example, Whiteland.

What seems to be the case is that temperatures (in Greenland, remember, not necessarily elsewhere) are slowly dropping over the last 10,000 years; that we're in a relatively cold patch in the general variation over that period; but that's just part of the long, slow descent to the next Ice Age. Peak warmth in this interglacial has passed.

Brrr.