Greenland is Having Quite a Year
It's Tuesday morning, February 10, 2026, 09:10, and I've updated this Web page with a link to the archive on the WBAI Web site and the poems that Pickles of the North read on the air. The original top of this page follows the arrow. ⇒ We talked a lot about the melting rate of the Greenland ice sheet being accelerated by algae that are on top of the ice. But we did more than that, so I'll be updating this Web page soon.
You can now listen to this program on the official WBAI Archive.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held this Wednesday February 11, 2026, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday night of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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Greenland has been in the news a lot more than usual in the past year. Unfortunately it hasn't mostly been for good reasons. That idiot Trump eventually backed off his threats to invade Greenland and take it over, but who can trust anything that liar says, so Greenland may still be in the sites of the MAGA fools. Canada and France have announced that they're opening consulates in Greenland, obviously to make some sort of political barrier to any invasion.
Greenland has also reported its warmest January on record. This is most probably caused by the global warming and climate crisis that Donnie Bonespur
Trump and his pals keep saying is a hoax, even as the big storms get bigger and decades of temperature readings show that the entire planet is getting warmer and some animal species are showing up in habitats that they would never have been in before, as others may face extinction due to the air or water that they live in being too warm for them to live in anymore.
But wait, there's more! Greenland's ice melt is being accelerated by algae darkening the island's surface.
Algae is a name for a lot of different organisms. In order to be classified as an alga, that's the singular, the organisms have to use photosynthesis and they have to not be land plants.
The latest studies show that Greenland is melting hundreds of billions of tons of ice every year and of course that ice melt runs off into the ocean, thereby raising sea levels. I'm reading that current thinking is that if the Greenland ice sheet were to just all melt it would raise sea levels by 23 feet. I'll note that Super Storm Sandy in 2012, had a storm surge of 11 feet and that made a mess of New York City. I'm not sure if WBAI's studios would be above sea level if that happened. Also with Super Storm Sandy the sudden rise in sea level didn't last for more than a day or so, whereas with a lot of Greenland's ice being melted into water that would be permanent situation.
It's been known for decades that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the planet. That's why in most Summers the North Pole is just a water feature these days.
Now the issue with the algae in Greenland is that it's darker than the white ice, and it forms a cover over the ice. The darker color lets the sunlight heat up the algae and the ice under it more than would happen if the ice weren't covered with the stuff. So the ice is warmed and melts more. The algal cover may help to keep in the warmth from the darker algae. And this seems to suit the algae on the ice just fine. As the ice melts minerals that the algae can use are released, and so the algae proliferate. It's a cascading event.
I'm reading in The New York Times about some papers published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology on January 13. The Times spoke to an assistant professor at the University of Waterloo named Dr. Jenine McCutcheon. She told the Times that There are lots of different factors that contribute to the melting of the ice sheet, and this project was trying to pick those apart,
and that algae is responsible for some 13 percent of the melt runoff in southwest Greenland.
Those papers say that what's happening is that wind is carrying dust from the ice-free edges of Greenland into the interior. That dust has phosphorus in it. Phosphorus is necessary for every living organism we know about. Among other things it makes up a major portion of a chemical called adenosine triphosphate, which is used for organic energy. Organisms can't do anything without Adenosine triphosphate, which we'll call by its initials ATP. Every beat of your heat, every blink of your eyes uses ATP. Every living cell of your body needs ATP in order to do anything at all. Scientists have determined decades ago that phosphorus is the limiting factor for how much life there can possibly be on Earth because once all of the phosphorus is in use no more new living things can exist until the older living things die off and their phosphorus becomes available to new organisms.
There are all sorts of algae in the world. Some are microscopic and some are - seaweed. You may have heard of algal blooms happening in some areas, the most well publicized algal bloom is probably Red Tide. These usually show up in water and the particular alga involved reproduces at such a prodigious rate that they use up all of the oxygen in the water and kill off the fish and other aquatic organisms that need oxygen to survive. Well, what's happening to the ice in Greenland is not as severe as that, mostly because there's a much larger percentage of oxygen in the air than you get in the ocean, and there's hardly anything living on the ice in Greenland. But the algal blooms on the ice are contributing to the melting of that ice. How and when we hit a tipping point where major portions of the Greenland glacier melts very rapidly and causes noticeably higher tides is not something that anyone can say, but at this rate it's is going to happen. These algal blooms are another aspect of climate change that no one could predict.
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Pickles here! We took a little poetry break in the program, with a reading of The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens and The Land of Counterpane,
contrasting Stevens' contemplation of the cold and snow in the woods with Robert Louis' depiction of a child's cozy fun in bed playing with his toys. We hope all our listeners get to appreciate the wildness of this Winter as well as being comfy and warm at home. Extreme Winter weather can be both invigorating and very tiring at the same time!
To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; One must have a mind of winter And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens
WHEN I was sick and lay a-bed, I had two pillows at my head, And all my toys beside me lay To keep me happy all the day. And sometimes for an hour or so I watched my leaden soldiers go, With different uniforms and drills, [42]Among the bed-clothes, through the hills; And sometimes sent my ships in fleets All up and down among the sheets; Or brought my trees and houses out, And planted cities all about. I was the giant great and still That sits upon the pillow-hill, And sees before him, dale and plain, The pleasant land of counterpane.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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