PEACE
IN THE NEW YEAR
To
see last years’ messages and pictures, go to http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/1999
or http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/2000
Click on underlined links to see
pictures. [I made them relatively small
to enable fast viewing. Please let me know if you think I should have
used larger ones, or if you want to see any in higher resolution.]
Top of the news:
·
Sherri ran for the Wall Township
Committee this past November, and came close, but did not win (this
year). Any improvement suggestions about
her campaign web site would be appreciated,
as she is leaning toward running again in 2002.
Sherri: Al Gore and I now have something in
common – we’re both “losers.” I ran an
exhausting campaign for a township committee seat and won 47% of the vote, but
my opponents won 53%. At least NJ will
have a Democratic governor. My
supporters are encouraging me to try again next year, now that I have name
recognition, but I’ll have to weigh the freedom to go around town, anonymously
dressed in grubbies, as opposed to having to look like a fashion plate all the
time.
The events of September 11th have also
influenced us, as we live in one of the counties most affected by the collapse
of the towers, which I viewed on TV along with students in a World
Civilizations I class. I had just
finished reviewing with them a Carl Sagan reading from “The Dragons of Eden” in
which he places all of time into one cosmic year, and had just repeated Sagan’s
last line, “it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of
the second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the
distinctly human sensitivity of mankind,” when a late-arriving student blurted
out the news. Those words of Sagan’s have haunted me since –
their optimism about the future tempered by the realization of the perils of
technology and the frailty of humanity.
It has been a sobering time for us all.
Suddenly, campaigning over the incidentals of local government meant
nothing, but, at the same time, it meant everything. After suspending the campaign for two weeks,
I returned with even greater enthusiasm, inspired to work even more actively to
participate in the process. I bought a
flag (not so easy to do in the weeks immediately following the attacks) and it
hangs in solidarity with those whose lives were and will be lost to secure
freedom. I support my country’s struggle
against terrorism, but would have preferred President Gore’s leadership, knowledge and
his already-proven endorsement for international cooperation to President Bush’s. Whether I run for elective office again or
not, I will continue to work actively to promote peace and democratic values.
My work environment will change in
2002. Though I am still teaching at
Brookdale, where I am celebrating my 29th year, I am finally moving into an
office with a lockable door (and a roommate, my co-author and colleague of 29
years, Tony Snyder). In honor of the big move, I bought a
giraffe-patterned rattan ottoman (they’d like us to keep everything
color-coordinated in shades of gray and gray), but we world historians don’t
work or think or decorate that way! This
fall I was recognized by my peers with an Outstanding Colleague Award, and
continue to be active on college committees.
Teaching is ever more rewarding, with students paying rapt attention to
the intricacies of the religion of Islam, or the intrigue and complex politics
of the South Asian region presently in the news. In the spring semester I’ll teach an honors
section of World Civilizations II again, along with Asian history, both of
which have been revised to include more background on present world
events. In May, if enough students
enroll, I and an anthropology professor hope to run a two-week study tour in Hawai’i, so I’m going to spend some
time over our break refreshing myself on early Polynesian migrations, and other
esoteric stuff.
Travel on my own time, sprinkled
liberally with historically-related stops, took us to Ecuador, Austria, and Greece (where I trekked up the
stairs in really hot weather twice in one day to visit the Parthenon—such
fun!!). In Ecuador we visited the rainforest,
pictures below, and in Austria I visited Salzburg with a new friend, Heddy Chang, that I met at Al’s conference. As she is presently serving on her town
council, we had lots to discuss. I also spent some time with
Dad and his wife, Marge, in Virginia, and am pleased to report that
they are doing well, still able to live independently. In July I reconnected with my Dad’s family in
his hometown of Weirton, West Virginia, thanks to the gently
prodding from my cousin, David Magnone. My sister, Gina, her children Rachel and Jamie, and I represented the Virginia branch of the Carpini clan
at a family
reunion. It was great to see
relatives that I hadn’t seen in 30 years or more. A few weeks later I enjoyed another brief
reunion with good high school friends, Marilyn and Candy, in Washington, DC. On Thanksgiving weekend I met William and Mary friends, Donna and Glick, in New York City. My wish is that 2002 will bring not only more
interesting travel, but, especially, the ability to see friends and family.
Dan moved down to Virginia for a few months at the
beginning of the year, but returned in April, broke and ready to get
serious. He worked most of the summer
and then began a culinary program at Brookdale.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t plan to continue that program, but will
continue in school, taking basic general education courses with a view to
working with kids. He’s now living in an
apartment nearby and is enjoying his new-found freedom from the harassment of his
mother. (Instead of 20 questions, I’ve managed to reduce it to 10 each time we
speak!) Brian is currently in an MFA
program at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, where he plans to get a
degree in Visual Effects. He loves what
he’s doing, spends a lot of time working at it, and was fortunate, along with
help from our good friend, Bob Bornstein, to find a nice apartment
and roommate in the heart of the city very near his school. He’s home for the holidays, but will probably
end up remaining in California when he graduates. Here’s the best picture of the four of us
from this year.
Please keep in touch and visit when
you’re in the area. Have a healthy and
productive 2002.
Alan: Things continue to go well at Rutgers. While Roni, our Dept. Chair left for greener
pastures (and a helicopter) at Duke, we were successful in hiring a new
assistant professor in atmospheric physics and recently obtained permission to hire a new professor at any
level to replace Roni. (While I briefly
considered throwing my hat in the ring to be Dept. Chair, I don’t have the same
political ambitions as Sher. I also did
not want to deal with all the administrative hassles. A biology professor in our Dept. has agreed to be Chair, and
is doing a great job so far.)
Gera Stenchikov is still working with
me as a Research Professor. I had one
student, Lori Thompson, receive her M.S. degree
this year after she changed advisors to me when Roni left. I will also take on another of Roni’s
students, Luke Oman, in January and he will
work with me and Gera on his Ph.D. My current Ph.D. students, Lifeng Luo and Juan Carlos Antuña, are doing fine. Juan Carlos got stuck in Camagüey, Cuba, after organizing and
running a conference there that I attended.
The new Bush State Department would not give him a visa, even though he
had entered the US five times before. After six months, I finally found a competent
and sympathetic worker there and was able to get him a visa in November, and he
will return in January to complete his Ph.D.
Lifeng is also doing very well.
We will go together to meetings in Orlando in January and New Orleans in May to present our
work. My postdocs, Mingquan Mu and
Gonzalo Miguez-Macho, will also go with me to the American Meteorological
Society (AMS) meeting in Orlando. I am involved with several joint research
projects at Princeton, in addition to continuing my work with Kostya Vinnikov, who has remained at Maryland.
This year I published only five papers
(four already published, one in press), but have two in review and will submit
three more very soon. However, as a
result of the work I have done in the past two years (published 20 refereed
journal articles and 16 other publications), I was awarded the 2001 Cook College Research Excellence Award,
“for active and original research documented by a series of research papers.”
I taught my regular atmospheric thermodynamics
course to undergraduate meteorology majors in the fall, and had a great class
this year. My graduate course in
Physical Climatology in the spring did not get enough students, so I will teach
it this coming spring. I will also teach
part of a course for a colleague who is on sabbatical. This year I obtained a grant from the US
Dept. of Education for eight graduate assistantships for three years each (two
of them are supported by matching funds from Rutgers) for my Dept. At least one of them, for Luke, is for a student working
with me, and the rest are for other members of the Dept.
With Roni leaving, I took over as
Director of the Center for
Environmental Prediction. We are the
group of faculty and students in our Dept. who work on meteorology and
climate. One of the things I am doing
with CEP is to take a group of 14 undergraduate meteorology majors to the AMS
meeting in Orlando. It will be a great experience for them.
I continue to work as Editor of Journal of Geophysical
Research-Atmospheres, one of the two most influential journals in my
field. I process about 400 papers per
year myself. It is a lot of work, but
very interesting. We just implemented an
electronic
submission, review, and publication system, so it should be more efficient
soon, once we have learned how to use the system.
My family are all doing well. My mother and Larry came to visit us recently
and my father and Hanne got back from a trip to Australia last month. My sister and Bryan are happy in San Diego. My niece Allison is happy that her Colorado team did so well this fall,
enabling her to travel to bowl games with the band. My brother and his family are also doing
well.
I have not slowed down in
traveling. I just can’t resist the
opportunity to go to new and interesting or old and enjoyable places. The two most interesting places I went were
to Cuba and Ecuador. My student, Juan Carlos Antuña, and I organized a Lidar Measurement in
Latin America Workshop, which was held in March, 2001, in Camagüey. It was
a very successful meeting, leading to several additional cooperative projects
on this topic in Latin America. I was
predisposed to like Cuba and its system. I thought it could not be as bad as made out
by anti-Castro propaganda in the US. And it is not, but life there is pretty bad
for most people. The electricity went
out five times during the week I was there.
Our hotel included breakfast and dinner with the room for $20 per day,
but the food was high in fat and had very little variety. Ham and cheese sandwiches were ubiquitous,
but I got tired of them after a while.
It was shocking how controlled and limited the lives of the people are
there. Travel is very difficult and
expensive, so most people stay in their home town. There was virtually no news on TV (although
they did have English and meteorology lessons) and Granma, the national
newspaper, was only about eight pages with very little news. There are only two TV stations, showing the
above-mentioned lessons, old movies, and stories about the glory of Cuban
sports teams and Castro. I had not been in a Communist
country for 10 years (not counting China, which does not feel like
this at all), and, while I liked the people, I was very happy to get home to
freedom and comfort. Walking into a
grocery store at home and seeing the variety and quality of food available was
as shocking as when I returned from the Soviet Union in the days when I traveled
there. It became very clear to me how
stupid the US policy toward Cuba is. If we want to improve the lives of people
there, we need much more engagement with them, not to isolate them. The more US tourists and businessmen
the people meet, and the more interdependent our economies become, the sooner
lives will improve for the people there, like has happened in Russia and China. Well, enough about politics. Let me show you some pictures from
Camagüey. Of course I smoked a cigar, but they were very expensive (the
only thing expensive there), so I did not bring any back. Here is the favorite
old car I saw there, which looks a little like my new Audi A4 (which is not so new now with 30,000 miles, but I
still love it). There were also other
old Fords and Chevys.
In fact I saw every car we had owned before 1960 there, but still
running. They had pork in the market, any part you would want. I had dinner
with Juan Carlos, his wife Ana and their son Juan Carlitos and her parents. It was great, and they even had a special
fish for me. Juan Carlos was working there while
his house was being renovated. One night
we went to a baseball game, where I saw my first
inside-the-park grand slam home run. Juan Carlos and Ana were very happy together, but
now he has to come back and finish his studies.
In early April I went to meetings in Potomac, Maryland, and Hampton, Virginia. Then Gera and I decided that we had
to visit a colleague who recently moved to Hawaii, so later in April we went to the University of Hawaii, where we each gave talks
and spent the weekend snorkeling and touring Oahu. On one day I also went over to the big island
to visit another colleague and plan to build a lidar in Ecuador.
In May, to plan for a lidar
observatory on the Equator, Sher and I spent 10 days in Ecuador. After visiting Quito and the potential lidar
site nearby, we took a trip to the Amazon jungle. We flew to Coca and then took a 5-hour canoe ride down the Napo River to Pañacocha (Piranha River) where we stayed at The Emerald Forest lodge in the jungle. There were no electricity or phones, and the bathroom was primitive, although there was running
cold water for the shower and toilets, pumped out of the
river. We took a boat up the Pañacocha River and hiked through the jungle. Sher played with the
tarantula in the lodge. We saw three different types of monkeys, but
they were hard to photograph. I caught a piranha,
which we had for dinner that night. It
is rather bony and does not have much meat.
We learned that they don’t really eat people, and Sher even swam in the river. On the way back at our lunch stop, Sher sampled some of the native products. Can you guess what she is eating? After we returned we learned that 15 American
oil workers had been kidnapped and held for ransom less than ten miles from
where we were staying. They were only
released two months before we got there, and one of them had been
executed. If we had known that, we
probably would not have gone.
In May I attended a workshop in State College, Pennsylvania. It was like a Midwestern college campus, and
I felt at home there, especially since their football team is not so hot any
more.
Then in July Sher and I went to Innsbruck, where I attended the IAMAS meeting.
Innsbruck has many delightful
streets, including one with both a
golden roof and golden arches. We
went hiking in the Alps with a friend, Ulli,
from where we had a great view looking down on
Innsbruck. We had a snack near the
gondola with another great view. There was a cow there
with a permanent view. Ulli also took
us to the Achensee, where we took a paddleboat and so did Ulli.
We hiked along a trail along the lake. It was
narrow but had nice views. One of the highlights was after the meeting
when we drove through the Alps to Bad
Reichenhall, Germany, where we saw Bob
Dylan perform in the courtyard of an old salt mine. It was drizzling and we had to stand, but it
was still a great concert.
In August, we went to Greece with my family. My
father and Hanne took us to a Club Med on Evia. It was hot, but a very interesting trip. On September 22 I flew to France to attend a conference in
Arcachon. It was very spooky flying out
of Newark airport on a 767 right over New York City, where I looked down at
night at the lit up ruins of the World Trade Center. I got the best parking spot ever at the
airport. I got there very early, and
checked in and went through security in 10 minutes. I then sat for over two hours before the
plane left. In France, however, everything was
normal, except the conference center in Arcachon
had an American flag draped over the entrance the first two days. I had a nice
view from my hotel, and went on a vineyard tour
in the middle of the conference. The
conference dinner was at another nice vineyard. I then spent a long weekend in Paris. I gave a lecture at the Sorbonne, and then
went to the Louvre, where I saw the Mona Lisa and a few other nice things. Paris is such a nice place – the
food, the Eiffel Tower and other monuments, and
the museums. People were nice to me,
too. I went up in the Eiffel Tower one night, keeping a
lookout for planes. Sherri and I will be eligible for
a sabbatical in a year and we are considering Paris or Hawaii, as two possibilities.
I have become the representative for Rutgers to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research,
which means I get to go to Boulder every October for the
annual meetings. This first time (to the
UCAR meetings, not to Boulder) was very nice, where I saw
my niece Allison and many friends.
I then made my annual trip to the American Geophysical Union Fall
Meeting in San Francisco in December. It was very nice as usual, and the special
session I organized went very well.
So as not to leave some of the travel
next year to chance, I have organized a Chapman Conference
on Volcanism and the Earth’s Atmosphere to be held in Thera, Greece, June
17-21, 2002. We will spend a week on Santorini, a beautiful
island and a volcano that erupted in the 17th Century BC and destroyed the
Minoan civilization on Crete.
Also, Sherri has organized two-week course in Hawaii in May, and I plan to go
along as the spouse.
Wisconsin did not do well this year,
but the Rose Bowl has been usurped for the national championship anyway so next
year we will do better and go again.
May your 2002 be a
healthy and fulfilling one. Happy New
Year!
Love,
Alan and Sherri
