Yah. People will just die. Refugee sort of implies a refuge. There’s not going to be such thing’s around if things go south as we fear they are likely to. It’s gonna play out far more like the Old Testament.
It depends on where you look. Glaciers pick up material for sure, but where they melt, it is all deposited as glacial till which provides nice heavy soil for agriculture. As Greenland thaws, all this stuff will be deposited upon it. Ireland for instance, and parts of the UK have been beneficiaries of this.
Also, worth considering is that it is virgin territory for exploration for minerals and other goodies.
No shortage of water either.
But even all that aside, it is newly available space. If you can build a city in a desert (Phoenix, Arizona lets say) you can build one on Greenland.
The only reason you can build a city in a desert is the abundance of cheap energy and the ability to build what it needs elsewhere. These two conditions are not met in an hypothetic refuge.
As for soil, the creation of soil in Ireland and the UK took quite a bit of time.
