PEACE
IN THE NEW YEAR
E-mail: |
|
|
|
January 1, 2007 |
|
Telephone: (732) 528-0064, -0074 (home), (732) 881-1610 (cell Alan), (732) 881-1609 (cell Sher) |
To see previous years’ messages and pictures, go to http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/1999 or http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/2000 or http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/2001 or http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/2002 or http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/2003 or http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/2004 or http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/2005
BE SURE TO CLICK ON UNDERLINED LINKS TO SEE PICTURES
Sherri:
As I write this on December 30, 2006, according to the Bush Countdown Clock
there are 751 days, 10 hours, 50 minutes, and 37, 36, 35, seconds left of his
presidency--and even though 2006 was a great year personally for me, time can't
pass quickly enough until our long "national (and international) nightmare" will
begin to be over--though I suspect we'll be suffering the rest of the time and
our kids will be paying the dime for this administration's consistently failed
policies for a long, long time...but no need to dwell on the depressing, we can
all watch the news for that. And the recent elections give hope that
people will start demanding better government.
Our big event in 2006 was the marriage of Brian to Ginger on October 28th in the Napoleon House in New Orleans, Louisiana, Ginger's family home. It being Halloween weekend, we were surrounded by festive costumed merry-makers and assorted crazies, as well as the love and happiness of the newlyweds and family and friends. Ginger's mother, Kit, invited us to their home on the Thursday before the wedding, where we met some of the family, and we met more on Friday at the rehearsal dinner at Jacques-Imo's, famous for its zany decor and scrumptious cuisine. Here are Brian and his grandmother and Ginger and her mother. That very night, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Duran Duran were eating there before their performance at the Voodoo Festival that weekend. Most of the weekend we stayed in the French Quarter, but on Friday I took a tour of the Gardens area with long-time friends, Anne and Steve Prudente, who had come in early for the wedding, and on Saturday, Alan visited the Lower Ninth Ward with my brother and family. They saw a collapsed church and many abandoned homes. The wedding itself was in a historic home where a plot to kidnap Napoleon from his exile in Elba was hatched (never carried out because Napoleon died before they could depart) in the center of the French Quarter, on the second floor with balconies overlooking the city. Here is the groom with his mother, and here are the four of us. Some of Brian's friends from New Jersey, Ginger's family, and ours mingled and celebrated the marriage of our son. Dan gave a moving toast to the new couple, who are now back in Sausalito after a honeymoon to Hawaii. A farewell breakfast at the home of Kit's neighbors, Tommy and Edie, was a wonderful way to round out a weekend of family, old and new friends, and to celebrate Brian and Ginger's new life.
Ginger is a nurse working at the Veteran's Hospital in San Francisco, and Brian is an animator with Secret Level, owned by Sega, also in San Francisco. He continues to write children's fiction and has other projects, but his CGA stuff is what pays the bills and their work allows both of them to live in lovely Sausalito. I visited in June, and again this past December, and enjoyed the fine food (I have a great recipe for Vietnamese Shaking Beef if anyone's interested), shopping, and the kids and their dogs, Murphy and Molly, whom Dan enjoyed during his visit. Dan is now in his third year of apprentice school for carpeting and flooring, and, because he's in the Carpenter's Union, gets good money and benefits. He's also taking a computer course at Brookdale this spring, continues to live at home with us, but is saving money so that he can move to an apartment with a friend.
My brother, Tom, and most of his family (Derek from Williamsburg missed the flight, alas!) turned 60 on Oct. 27th, so we had a family lunch and celebration at a New Orleans restaurant on the day of Brian and Ginger's wedding. Alan's brother and sister and families were also in attendance at the wedding, and we missed my sisters, as well as Hanne and Steve, Alan's father. New Orleans is still reeling from Katrina, and almost everyone we ran into thanked us for coming to visit, and had a story to tell about their own experiences Katrina and post-Katrina. To sum up, most echoed the sentiments of the t-shirts we saw in one of the souvenir shops--"FEMA is a four-letter word" or "FEMA - Fix Everything, My Ass!"
I attended the
wedding of my cousin Dave Magnone's daughter,
Leslie, in St. Petersburg, FL, in November and had a chance to stay with my
former mother-in-law, Mary, and my ex-sister-in-law, Cheryl, who has since
retired from teaching in Rochester, NY, and relocated to Florida, where her
answering machine indicates that she and husband Steve are either "at the beach,
kayaking, or playing golf," in general, enjoying life, as we enjoyed them after
the New Orleans wedding with a midnight walk down Bourbon Street.
Me professionally? I'm still teaching at Brookdale and this past fall struggled to keep up with all the crises in the Middle East, along with the World Civilizations survey courses (one of which is online, with a different set of technological demands on my time). When I've taught the Middle Eastern History course in the past there is usually one hotspot, but this year--three, four, five, every part of the area, including the Horn of Africa--thanks a lot! Of course, it made for record number of students, in fact I had to turn them away (yes, for a history course), though some dropped when they realized we weren't going to spend all of our time chatting about current events and that they actually had to do some work. I found this interesting book, 1979: The Year That Shaped the Modern Middle East (David Lesch), which focuses on three events that created a paradigm shift in the events in the Middle East and beyond down to today--the Iranian Revolution, the Camp David Accords, and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, and used that book as a jumping off point for group research projects. In the process, one group presentation recommended a website, "Occupation 101," a YouTube for history and news junkies. I also organized a speaker's series to make up for my lack of background in particular areas. In sum, my work continues to go well, and, along with my teaching, I continue to serve as the Faculty Liaison to the International Center, which is struggling with staffing transitions. Despite that, we continue to raise money for scholarships, were featured in an article on community colleges and international student in the Chronicle of Higher Education in the fall, and are working hard to create more global awareness on campus and to send more students out into the world.
As for the world, I again took students to Hawaii with my colleague Barbara Jones, where her daughter, Kelsey read one of Brian's manuscripts and loved it (thanks, Kelsey!), and where our students enjoyed their stay and didn't complain about dorm life or mass transit! Hawaii continues to be a magical place and Dan connected with some of the students and continues to see them from time to time. In August I helped celebrate my Aunt Frances' 91st birthday in Charlottesville, along with my cousin Butch, his wife Astrid, nephew Gabe and wife Concha and their children. We had a good time catching up on my mother's side of the family. Other trips Al has described below. 2007 promises to be another year of fun and exploration in that regard, starting with our January 3rd trip to Paris where we will stay in an apartment on the Left Bank and enjoy! My love affair with Paris still continues, so that every chance to get to vacation (not tied to one of Al's conferences, which, frankly, are in pretty snazzy places--see below) we head to Paris. But also on the horizon are trips to Mexico, Italy, and I'm sure I'll get back to San Francisco sometime over the next year. The rest of my time is spent exercising at this great little health club, Wings, where I take yoga and pilates classes as well as being tortured in some personal training sessions, volunteer with Meals on Wheels, and continue to dabble in politics. Retirement? I think about it and probably will act on it sometime in the next five years, but, for now, all is well.
Please visit us--our home at the Jersey Shore has an extra bedroom and we'd love to see you.
Alan: Last year was great, with one exception. My father's brother, Len, died on on April 25, 2006. He was a boxer in college and suffered for the last years of his life from having been hit in tht head too many times, dementia pugilistica. Here is his obituary. I had been taking account of his affairs, and he had been slowly declining in a nursing home. He did not have much of a quality of life by the time he died. He did not recognize me the last time I visited him.
Of course, we are happy about the result of the congressional elections, but sorry that we have to endure another two years of the Bush regime. My favorite recent bumper sticker: Impeach Cheney First!
Things continue to go well at Rutgers. My student Luke Oman received his Ph.D. in December, 2005, and worked with Gera Stenchikov and me as a postdoc for most of 2006 and we produced several important results on the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate and the climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflict. We got a lot of publicity about our nuclear work at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco in December. You can see a summary of the results at http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/ . Students Haibin Li passed his Ph.D. exam in late 2006 and student Chaochao Gao should complete her Ph.D. early in 2007. Postdoc Richard Anyah is working hard on our 5-year NSF grant to look at the effects of climate change on water resources. A Fulbright visiting scholar, Elif Sertel, began working with me on the effects of land cover changes on climate in the Istanbul region. I published eight papers all together in 2006, and have three papers in press and four more submitted. If you are interested in more information or want to read them, visit my home page and click on Publications. We hired one new faculty member this year, Steve Decker, from the University of Wisconsin, and are searching for one more. As Bob Harnack retired, I became the Undergraduate Curriculum Coordinator for the Meteorology Program. It is a lot of work, involving preparing advertising material in print and on the web, conducting an Open House in the Fall, reorganizing the curriculum, advising students, and managing the teaching schedule.
I ended up getting a lot of publicity for my work this year, appearing on the Lou Dobbs show on CNN on July 13 with Mike Mann and Gavin Schmidt talking about global warming, on CNN Radio's The Heat Is On on August 3 (hear the podcast - I appear after 16 minutes) and in US News and World Report on October 23 talking about geoengineering, and on New Jersey Network television interviewed on September 20 about our Climate Symposium and on December 20 about the climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflict (Click here to watch).
I received the Editor’s Award from the Journal of Hydrometeorology, “for providing timely, insightful, and comprehensive reviews that have helped to ensure the publication of high quality research,” which was presented at the American Meteorological Society Annual Awards Banquet, February 1, 2006. I also received the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Research, the university’s highest honor for distinguished research contributions, May 4, 2006, given by President Richard McCormick. My father and Hanne came to the ceremony.
I was elected President-Elect of the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in 2006, and started my service in July, 2006. I will serve as President-Elect for two years, President for the next two years, and Past President for two more years. This means I help run all activities of our section, including at meetings, publications, and awards (such as AGU Fellows). I also now manage the Atmospheric Sciences Section portion of the AGU web page. My one specific campaign pledge was to have better social events at the AGU Fall Meeting. In December, 2006, I organized a Chinese banquet with entertainment from Lynda Williams, who performed songs specially written to pertain to weather and climate. It was well-attended and very successful.
Al Gore gave an inspirational talk the AGU Meeting, challenging scientists to have the courage to speak out more to the public and communicate the results of their work, so that the public can make more informed policy decisions. I got to sit in the front row, and Al Gore walked into a room with 4,000 people and walked right up to me and shook my hand. After the address, I was able to talk with him briefly. His new movie is great and is helping to convince most Americans of the danger of global warming. He is my first choice for Democratic candidate for President in 2008, and I hope we all get behind him soon.
As President-Elect and then President of the Atmospheric Sciences Section, I serve a four-year term on the AGU Council, which runs AGU. At my first Council meeting, at the December 2006 AGU Fall Meeting, I pointed out my concern that ExxonMobil sponsorship of the student Morning Mixer violated our policy of contributors to AGU obtaining special privileges from their donations, that it kept students away from an opportunity to engage with AGU leadership, and that it hurt AGU’s reputation to be associated with a company with an anti-science policy when it comes to global warming. My concern produced much discussion, and as a result, Fred Spilhaus, AGU Executive Director, said that naming the session after ExxonMobil was a huge error on the part of AGU, and that it would be corrected and never happen again. And he promised to be vigilant about similar problems in other AGU activities. But I still have to follow through to get AGU to change these policies in writing.
I was able to take many nice trips again this year. I went to Atlanta twice, for the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in January and to give a talk at a Public Health conference in December. In March, we returned to Paris for a week during Spring Break, just to enjoy the city again (and we will be there the first week in January, 2007, too). The city was wracked with student strikes about a law that would have affected their job security in their first jobs. It reminded me of the 60's in Madison, with police in riot gear and with tear gas. The university where I had worked was closed. We marched with the students, and it was clear that they would win, just like we stopped the Vietnam War. The Seine was overflowing its banks, but that did not stop the lovers. We attended an anti-war (Iraq) rally. We also enjoyed the rest of the time, eating and just living in such a great place. We went up the Eiffel Tower again, as the line was so short, and it is so nice.
I visited the University of Texas in Austin in March. It is supposed to be the nicest place in Texas, but I did not find it charming. In March, I left for a conference on soil moisture observations at the European Space Agency in Noordwijk, Netherlands, where I visited Leiden. Then I visited Warsaw for the first time, giving lectures at the University of Warsaw. I tried to get some collaborative work going, but it did not work out. Next I went to Vienna for the European Geosciences Union meeting, where I got to visit with an old friend, Ulli Pechinger, along the flooded Danube. When I got home, I had to go to San Francisco for a UCAR University Relations Committee meeting.
In May, Sherri went with me to a conference in Guangzhou, China. We flew right over the North Pole, after flying over sea ice in Hudson Bay. We stayed at the White Swan Hotel, which Kim Jung Il had taken over on a visit just before. We ate breakfast watching junks on the Pearl River. It is also where all the Americans stay on their visits to adopt Chinese babies. Guangzhou, formerly Canton, is bigger than every city in the US, except for New York, and has both an old part and a brand new downtown. We took a conference cruise on the Pearl River with Caspar Ammann and Hans Graf, where all the new buildings were lit up. We saw several examples of poor English translation, including Mickey Rat, a no spitting sign, and a darn woman, referring to this set of statues in the old city. In the park near our hotel, people were dancing and photographing newlyweds. We found a Russian bootleg copy of the new Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movie. You can see on the cover that it was released on May 4, 2006, and we took this picture on May 13! Here is our farewell dinner with my student Chaochao Gao. And here are some nice mops.
Then we flew to Guilin and took a cruise down the river through the remarkable limestone hills. On the way you could see one of the many sources of pollution that make the view either beautiful hills in the "mist" or dirty, unhealthy air to breath. Each day, after loading, there is a parade of boats down the Li River. They cooked our lunch on the back of each boat. Locals paddled their boats out to try to sell fans and other souvenirs. A fisherman waited with his cormorant. Each hill was more scenic than the next, but the river provided its own source of air pollution. We visited a village at the end of the boat trip, where a nice couple showed us their kitchen. You could see why they put a view of Guilin right on the 20 RMB Chinese currency.
We then spent a few days in Shanghai. In Pudong, we went up in both the Jin Mao Tower and the Oriental Pearl TV tower, where we had lunch in the highest revolving restaurant in Asia. Inside the top of the Jin Mao Tower is a Grand Hyatt Hotel with a 35-story, 152 meter atrium. From the old Peace Hotel, where I stayed on my first trip to Shanghai in 1984, we stood on the roof and watched all the raw materials moving up the Wangpo river on barges to continue the construction of China. We listened to the famous Jazz Band, which has been performing at the Peace Hotel since before the revolution. You might think that they drink tea in China, but Starbucks is making inroads, in the old section of Shanghai as well as in Pudong. The old and the new coexist, with the Radisson Hotel visible from a park downtown, people still moving goods on bikes and Ipod ads. Yao Min is a hero, with a display at the top of the Jin Mao Tower, as well as a wax sculpture.
After Shanghai, we went to Hangzhou for a day to give a talk at Zhejiang University and take a boat ride on the famous West Lake with my student, Chaochao Gao, right next to the modern downtown. She took me to buy some of their famous green tea and took us to dinner at Zuibai House, where we had some hot soup. Our flight home was delayed, and we stayed for a day in Beijing, where we got to visit my former postdoc Suxia Liu and her husband Xingguo Mo. That night, it took three people to prepare our Peking Duck.
The air was incredibly polluted everywhere in China, noticeably more so than during our most recent previous trip in 1998. The view from the Jin Mao Tower was very hazy. Looking back toward old Shanghai in the morning, we could barely see the Peace Hotel on the river. It cleared up a little in the afternoon, but the air was still filthy. They are going to have to solve their air pollution problem soon, and also deal with carbon dioxide emissions while they are at it.
In June I was invited to attend a meeting in Les Diablerets, Switzerland to serve on the review panel for the new World Meteorological Organization Ozone Assessment. It is a beautiful village at the foot of the Alps. Sherri joined me and we drove through the Grand St. Bernard tunnel to Italy and ended up in Nice, France, where we spent several days. The Chagall museum is exquisite. The old town is very scenic, as is the rocky beach. We went to Monaco one day, driving along the Grand Corniche, and saw the oceanography museum and aquarium. We finally drove back to Geneva in a long, all-day trek through the western foothills of the Alps, but it was very scenic. We went to bars to watch World Cup games in Les Diablerets and Nice, with the Swiss watching Switzerland, the Italians watching Italy (in Nice), and the French watching France. It was fun watching with knowledgeable fans, and we watched the final games after we got home. In July, I went to a 3-day meeting at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, which I had visited at age 16 with my family. They still do the demonstration that electricity stays on the outside of a metal object, and they have an exhibit of boats that includes models of a Titicaca reed boat and Brazilian jongada like I have in my living room. I went to the Hofbrau Haus and had a traditional meal. As mentioned below, I saw a poster for the Stones the night after I got there an attended a concert in the Olympic Stadium. The city has nice parks, full of naked people.
In July and August, I accompanied Sherri to Hawaii where she again taught a two-week course. I gave a couple talks, but we found time to go snorkeling and I climbed Diamond Head with Dan. When Sherri and I were returning from snorkeling, we were interviewed for a local TV station, KNHL. You can see a web page about our fame-making performances here. I went to Boulder at the end of September to give lectures at the University of Colorado and also in October to attend the annual UCAR meetings. It is a very nice place to visit. At the end of October we went to New Orleans for Brian and Ginger's wedding (see above). I also gave lectures in Iowa in November and was able to attend a Wisconsin game (see below).
I went to San Francisco twice at the end of the year, once in November to attend a conference on geoengineering, and then to attend the AGU meetings (discussed below). Geoengineering is the idea that we can block out sunlight to prevent global warming, but it is a bad idea for many reasons. Sherri and Dan went with me on the last trip, and we visited Brian and Ginger, and our friends Bob and Sureyya Bornstein.
I got to see Bob Dylan perform twice this year, once in Reading, Pennsylvania on August 23 and once at the Meadowlands (Continental Airlines Arena) on Nov. 16, with my brother Jerry. I was pretty close both times, standing in a baseball field in Reading and sitting in the 14th row in NJ. He sang 5 songs from his great new album Modern Times at the second show, which was fabulous. This makes 38 times I have heard him live, and I look forward to more. In addition to continuing to perform 100 shows a year, Bob has started as a radio DJ, doing a weekly Theme Time Radio Hour on XM radio. He talks, jokes, and shares his encyclopedic knowledge of American music as he plays songs all related to one theme. The first one was Weather, and now there have been 34 shows so far. I recorded them all. If you want to listen, please let me know. In addition, Sherri and I used some of my miles to fly to Cleveland in August and visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the birthplace of rock and roll. They had a special exhibit on the early years of Bob Dylan, which was very interesting, and we heard a lecture by a guy who had done a biography of Dave van Ronk and talked about his interactions with Dylan when he first came to the Village. At the end of September we saw the Thyla Tharp musical The Times They Are A'Changin'. It made me realize again how hard it is for anyone to improve on the way Bob does his own material. She had inferior singers and dancers exercising all over the stage. The show closed soon after it opened, but I had to see it as soon as I could.
I got to see many other great concerts this year, Christine Lavin in January, Bruce Springsteen in April doing his great new folk song album, the Stones in July, Peter, Paul, and Mary in April (their first one since Mary's bout with cancer) and August (Mary still has her fire), Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in August, and Arlo in October. Some of these folks are getting quite old, so I feel lucky to have had a chance to see them, maybe for the last time. I just happened upon the Stones concert in Munich at the Olympic Stadium when I was there for a conference, and ended up sitting next to Wladimir Klitschko, world heavyweight boxing champ. He is a very nice guy, with a Ph.D. in exercise physiology, and talked for quite a while. I see from his web site that he and his brother were just named UNESCO Champions for Sport.
Wisconsin did not go to the Rose Bowl again this year, but will be in the CapitalOne Bowl on Jan 1, 2007. They only lost one game this year, to Michigan, and Ohio State did not lose any. I gave a talk in Iowa this fall and chose the weekend of the Badger game, so got to see Wisconsin win a game this year. I had not been to a college game for a while, and it was great fun.
May your 2007 be a healthy and fulfilling one. Happy New Year!
Love,
Alan and Sherri