Forecasts suggest that global heating could create a shortcut from Asia to North America, and new routes for trading, shipping – and attack

Another week, another freak weather phenomenon you’ve probably never heard of. If it’s not the “weather bomb” of extreme wind and snow that Britain is hunkering down for as I write, it’s reports in the Guardian of reindeer in the Arctic struggling with the opposite problem: unnaturally warm weather leading to more rain that freezes to create a type of snow that they can’t easily dig through with their hooves to reach food. In a habitat as harsh as the Arctic, where survival relies on fine adaptation, even small shifts in weather patterns have endlessly rippling consequences – and not just for reindeer.

For decades now, politicians have been warning of the coming climate wars – conflicts triggered by drought, flood, fire and storms forcing people on to the move, or pushing them into competition with neighbours for dwindling natural resources. For anyone who vaguely imagined this happening far from temperate Europe’s doorstep, in drought-stricken deserts or on Pacific islands sinking slowly into the sea, this week’s seemingly unhinged White House talk about taking ownership of Greenland is a blunt wake-up call. As Britain’s first sea lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, has been telling anyone prepared to listen, the unfreezing of the north due to the climate crisis has triggered a ferocious contest in the defrosting Arctic for some time over resources, territory and strategically critical access to the Atlantic. To understand how that threatens northern Europe, look down at the top of a globe rather than at a map.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

The strong and silent masculine image is often derided, but why? Perhaps companionship via trains, golf or a quiet drink is enough

It’s good to talk. Or so men are always being told, by everyone from mental health campaigners to the women they live with, bemused by the male tendency to spend all night in the pub with friends they have known for decades and yet come back utterly clueless about whatever is going on in each other’s lives. What can they be doing, all that time? Why haven’t they asked how X feels about splitting up with his girlfriend, or how Y is coping with his father dying?

To women whose own friendships revolve around an intimate and encyclopaedic knowledge of each other’s innermost feelings, intimacy based on never seemingly talking about anything that matters looks oddly empty and sad. No wonder, we think to ourselves, that more than a quarter of British men say they have no close friends at all; that male loneliness is endemic, that they won’t go to the doctor until they are practically dying, that male suicide rates are higher than female ones, that too many middle-aged men in particular seem to feel permanently angry for reasons they can’t articulate even to themselves. Bottling everything up does nobody any good.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist