“Before, the growing season was too short for vegetables,” said Noah Melgaard, a local journalist. “Now it is getting longer each year.”

For Clinton, who was visiting Greenland for a meeting of the eight-nation Arctic Council, it was one of several jarring contradictions that threatened at times to distract from the messages she traveled 2,000 miles to deliver. The secretary argued for a global response to climate change but had to acknowledge that the United States — the single biggest source of greenhouse-gas pollution — has failed to ratify international treaties on reducing carbon dioxide emissions…

At the Godthab Bryghus, a popular pub in this ethnically mixed town of 15,000, outdoorsmen talked of growing herds of caribou on the hills above the town, their numbers swelling due to milder winters and more plentiful forage until local officials finally had to ease restrictions on killing them. But one avid hunter, a scruffy-bearded Nuuk native who identified himself only as Louis, complained that the summer caribou season had grown oppressively hot, with temperatures climbing into the mid-70s.

“The heat is terrible,” he said.