PEACE IN THE NEW YEAR
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December 31, 2007 |
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Telephone: (732) 528-0064 (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 or http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/2006
BE SURE TO CLICK ON UNDERLINED LINKS TO SEE PICTURES
Sherri:
As I write this on December 31, 2007, the Bush Countdown Clock
registers that there are 385 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 37, 36, 35, seconds left of his
presidency--not a minute too soon for me, but you all know that. I also
write as a three-time loser, having tried and failed again to win election to
local office in Wall Township. I campaigned
in the Bus For Change (with friend Ron Sopenoff) and at parties
with Congressman Frank Pallone.
But here is how sad I was when the final tally came in.
However, 2008 has just got to be a better year for Democrats and for thinking
people everywhere. I lean towards Edwards at this point (New Jersey's
primary is on February 5), but basically agree with a woman interviewed in Iowa
recently--the Democratic field is rich with promise, and she supports "All of the above," so
that, rather than having no choices (think Republican field), I can easily
support any choice and will work as hard as in 2004 for a saner future.
Also, Alan and I plan to serve on township committees, because, even though I
lost, two independent candidates won and we shared similar positions on a range
of local issues.
Brian and Ginger are still living in Sausalito, but are looking (hoping is more like it!) to buy a house somewhere in the area. Needless to say, sticker shock prevails still in the San Francisco area, and their price range doesn't afford them much. They went to Austin, Texas, recently thinking to relocate to a more affordable area, but decided against it. So, Mom and Al can continue to visit them as often as possible. We were just there in December, and saw them a couple of other times this past year, once on a family vacation in the Bahamas. Ginger continues as a nurse 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 he's sent his latest book off to an agent with hopes that 2008 will be the lucky year. He's taken up surfing and they seem to have a good life there, with dogs Murphy and Molly. Dan is in his fourth year of apprenticeship for carpeting and flooring, and, because he's in the Carpenter's Union, gets good money and benefits, and last January moved into an apartment in Ocean Grove, in fact, in the back apartment of the house I used to own (wish I had been able to keep it at the time!). It's furnished, all utilities included, and convenient to his job. Increasingly, Dan is working in New York City but his shop is based locally, so the early morning hours he has to keep would be impossible if he had a long commute. He's still a basketball junkie, a real fan of LeBron, and in 2008 he hopes to meet the girl of his dreams. He asked me to tell all of you to have a great 2008 and to send money!!!
This summer our former Japanese exchange student Madoka and his 10 year old son, Hibiki, visited with us. We had a great time taking them to the beach, to some local outdoor fairs, and to the Big Apple, where we enjoyed a beautiful day at the Top of the Rock, despite the terror alert being raised that very morning to orange! We also took them to a Yankee game with Alan's father and Hanne, We've also recently celebrated Christmas with Al's family, where we took the traditional picture of Alan, Jerry, and Lisa on the couch (can you believe they used to look like this?), and Brian came for a short visit in June to attend a Writer's Workshop in Princeton. As for my side of the family, we celebrated my nephew Kyle's wedding to Lauren in early August, where the entire family gathered on Geneva Lake, New York. Bob's mother, Mary, got to see her grandkids. My brother Tommy's daughter, Heather, worked for a time in White Plains on "Horton Hears a Who," and she spent Labor Day with us, and we saw her in the city. Sadly, my Aunt Frances, 91, succumbed to cancer, but I had a chance to see her and cousins Kay and Butch, and celebrated her life with her family and friends. Aunt Frances was always an inspiration to me, and I think some of my love of travel came from her visits to Hampton with her husband, Ken, who worked all around the world for the State Department. I haven't seen my sisters lately, so am encouraging them to venture North--And that applies to any and all. Here is Fran at her 90th birthday celebration, and here am I in the same bed at her memorial service at an inn near where Butchy lives. Here are me, my brother Tom and my cousins Butch and Kay and their spouses at the memorial service. (I added the previous 6 sentences so late (Jan. 6th) that I've heard from many of you, and thanks so much for your cards and updates, and come visit!) Now that Dan has moved out we have two free bedrooms and lots of extra space besides.
While thoughts of retirement occurring from time to time, I'm still teaching at Brookdale, both the history of the Modern Middle East and the World Civilizations survey courses (one of which is online, with a different set of technological demands on my time). In the Middle Eastern History course I had to include Pakistan to the list of possible failed states in the larger region. Student interest remains high and I continue to use speakers to fill in gaps in my own background. We finally hired a new Director of the International Center, where I continue as the Faculty Liaison, and we've been successful in raising money for scholarships, developing global programs for the community, and are the #1 community college in sending students overseas. This May, I'll venture to Egypt with Anthropology professor Barbara Jones (with whom I've gone to Hawaii several times) and Al will audit one of the classes and be our climatologist for the program.
In addition to Egypt, 2008 will take us to the Middle East several more times, next week to Istanbul, where Alan's student will defend her dissertation, and I will revel in the history and majesty of the city. In February Alan has been invited to Israel and I will accompany him, so my Middle Eastern History students will benefit from the pictures and added info I'll get on those trips. We have to spend one week in Paris this year, as we've done every year since 2004, so our March Spring Break will see us spend a week at a rented apartment on the Left Bank and gain at least 5 pounds on the baguettes and chocolate we'll consume. The rest of my time is spent exercising at this great little health club, Wings, where I take yoga and pilates classes, volunteer with Meals on Wheels, and will gear up for presidential politics in 2008.
I wish you all a prosperous, peaceful, and politically active 2008! Please keep in touch.
Alan:
I guess a year in which I win the Nobel Peace Prize has to be considered a good
one. That is, if I really did win it. What is absolutely correct is
that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did win the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2007 (along with Al Gore), and I am a member of the IPCC, along
with about 2,500 of my closest friends, including
seven other
faculty members at Rutgers.
The Rutgers website had an
announcement of our award for a brief time. Whether individual members
of IPCC can claim to be Nobel laureates is a matter of discussion among my
friends. The Chair of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, said, "This is an
honour that goes to all the scientists and authors who have contributed to the
work of the IPCC, which alone has resulted in enormous prestige for this
organization and the remarkable effectiveness of the message that it contains.”
The actual
Nobel Peace Prize announcement says, "Through the scientific reports it has
issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed
consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.
Thousands of scientists and officials from over one hundred countries have
collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of the warming."
Since I was a contributing author to eight of the chapters of the different
reports over the past 20 years, a reviewer of many more chapters, and a
participant in an important IPCC workshop three years ago in Paris, I have
decided that I did win the Nobel Peace Prize. I have always wanted to win
the Nobel Peace Prize, in spite of mistaken awards in the past (Henry
Kissinger), but never thought it would happen. It is great that this is a
peace award and not a science award, and it means that my entire life's work has
been recognized as being important for world peace. Furthermore that it is
a joint award speaks to the collaborative nature of our work. I'll take
it.
I also won the Bradley Prize this year, consisting of a silver bowl with my name engraved and a check for $200. It is from the Geological Society of Washington for the best talk of the year, out of 31 talks given at their meetings in 2007. It was a rainy night in October, and I went to their meeting at the Cosmos Club near Dupont Circle. While I had a nice dinner, there were not that many people there (it was a World Series night) and there were some hostile questions. I was completely shocked to find out that I got the award. Perhaps it was the topic, "Nuclear winter revisited: climatic consequences of nuclear conflict using current nuclear arsenals." My colleagues and I have tried to publicize these results during the past year, and this is one of the limited successes. All our papers and figures, as well as PowerPoints on the results, are available at http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/. (I just found out that Chris Newhall, with whom I served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, and who went on to fame as a volcanologist, won the Bradley Prize in 1996. Chris and I organized a special session together at the AGU Meeting in 2001 on the 10th anniversary of the Pinatubo eruption and wrote an article together summarizing the results in Science.)
I was named the American Meteorological Society/Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer for 2008-2009. This means I will be on a list of speakers available for talks around the country, and I expect to have several invitations to talk about nuclear winter, climate change, and geoengineering.
Things continue to go well at Rutgers. My student Chaochao Gao passed her Ph.D. exam in December, 2007, and will soon complete the final revisions. Another student, Elif Sertel, a Fulbright Scholar from Istanbul Technical University who has been working with me for the past year and a half has also completed her Ph.D. dissertation and will be examined in January in Istanbul. I have been invited to be on her committee there, and am looking forward to visiting Istanbul for the first time. Sherri will come on the trip. I submitted two National Science Foundation proposals this year, one to study geoengineering with Gera Stenchikov and Martin Bunzl at Rutgers and Rich Turco at UCLA, and another to study climate change and hydrology in the Greater Horn of Africa with Richard Anyah at Rutgers, and both were funded. So I will soon begin working with two new graduate students, Ben Kravitz on the geoengineering project and a new one we will choose later on the other project. Elif will continue to work with Ying Fan Reinfelder and me on a third project, at least for a while. I published 12 refereed journal articles this year, and have one more submitted. If you are interested in more information or want to read them, visit my home page and click on Publications.
I continue to serve as the Director of the Meteorology Undergraduate Program. We have 30 freshmen this year interested in Meteorology, and the Open House this past October was very well attended. We hired an excellent new Associate Professor this year, Mark Miller, and look forward to having him as a colleague for a long time. However, we still need at least two more Meteorology faculty members to offer more than a bare-bones curriculum for our undergrad and graduate students.
I got several mentions in the press this year, with the most important a story about me and my work on geoengineering in Newsweek on November 23. In September I appeared in “Mega Disasters” on the History Channel talking about the 1883 Krakatau eruption, in November I appeared in a “A Global Warning?” on the Discovery Channel discussing the effects of volcanic eruptions on climate (filmed at Yellowstone Park), and I appeared on Channel 9 News in February discussing the just-released IPCC report. I was interviewed on CNN radio, AP radio, the Paradise Parking Lot radio show on the Progressive Radio Network, and KCBS radio in San Francisco. And I or my work was mentioned multiple times in newspaper and magazine articles, including Science News, Discover magazine, Denver Post, Associated Press, Albany Times Union, Athens (Ohio) News (twice), Discover magazine (again), Newark Star-Ledger, New Scientist, Nature, Nature (again), Bergen Record, Wired Online, Philadelphia Inquirer, Seattle Times, Asbury Park Press, Toronto Star, Fox News, Newark Star-Ledger (again), Newark Star-Ledger (another time), San José Mercury News, and Newark Star-Ledger (a final time).
As President-Elect of the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) I was successful in having Exxon-Mobil sponsorship removed from the student breakfast at the Fall Meeting. This year it was an AGU student breakfast, and a nice opportunity for students to meet AGU leadership. I once again organized a Chinese banquet with entertainment from Lynda Williams, who performed songs specially written to pertain to weather and climate. It was sold out and very successful. Lynda serenaded the Nobel Peace Prize winners at the banquet, and then applauded them. Warren Wiscombe, Atmospheric Sciences President presented the Holton Award to Alfonso Saiz-Lopez.
The issue of global warming had more attention from the public this past year than ever in my life. I gave multiple talks on the subject to the United Nations, community groups, schools, and scientific groups. Governor Corzine issued an executive order requiring that New Jersey drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The same restrictions were then proposed as a law in New Jersey and I testified at a New Jersey Assembly Environment and Solid Waste Committee hearing on bill A-3301, the Global Warming Response Act, in West Orange, New Jersey in February. I then participated with Assemblywoman Linda Stender in a public forum about the legislation in May. The bill passed, and now New Jersey leads the planet in its requirements for reducing emissions that cause global warming. I also gave a talk at a conference in New Brunswick on the effects of climate change on New Jersey organized by U.S. Senator Menendez.
Yet I drove to these meetings in my yellow 2000 Audi A4, which gets about 21 miles per gallon. It is a great car, my favorite color, and with a fabulous ride and sound system, but I felt guilty driving it. So I sold the Audi and just two weeks ago I picked up a brand new 2008 Toyota Prius. It is Barcelona Red Metallic, the brightest color available, and actually quite peppy. It also has several features not in my old car, XM radio, a backup camera, Bluetooth to connect to the phone in my pocket, and a hatchback, which allows a large amount of cargo. Furthermore, it is getting 42 miles per gallon. The technology is very interesting. The main thing it does is turn off the engine whenever you take your foot off the gas, and the car just coasts with the engine off. It also generates electricity whenever it is slowing down and uses the electric motor to help power the car, especially at low speeds, but it is simply turning off the gasoline engine whenever it can that I think is the major factor. It is the 7th Prius in my Department at Rutgers, and the first day I drove in I parked next to three others, so I am a follower, but I finally get it.
Furthermore, in August, 2006, we ordered solar panels (photovoltaic) for our roof. A year later, the state of New Jersey processed our application for a $43,500 grant to help pay for them, and we then proceeded to cut down the giant oak trees shading the roof, extending the roof to make room for the 10 kW system, re-landscaping the yard, putting a new roof on the house and installing plastic fascia to cover the old wood and make it maintenance-free, and having the solar panels installed. Our house went from looking like this with trees to this with no trees to this with landscaping and panels. The panels are on the roof, but are still not properly tilted and hooked up, which should take place very soon. Considering the grant, the one-time tax refund, the electricity we will generate (and can sell back to the system running our meter backwards when we generate more than we use), and the renewable energy certificates we will receive and can sell back to the electric company each year, the system should pay for itself in 5 years or so. It is very interesting to see how hard it is to go green yourself and how much it costs - installing compact fluorescents this year was the easy part - and I will write an article about it soon. But the New Jersey subsidies made it do-able, and the Federal government needs to move in that direction very quickly. Here is our house with our two hybrids. It should be beautiful in the summer and fall with the new trees blooming.
Again, I was able to take many nice trips this year. In January, Sherri and I went to Paris for a week, continuing our pledge to spend a week there every year for the rest of our lives. We just lived there, enjoying eating in restaurants or our rented apartment, going to movies and museums (including the restored L'Orangerie with Monet's Water Lilies), and walking around. They had a Ferris Wheel at the Place De La Concorde. We had read in the New York Times a great review for a play, "Looking for Josephine," at the Opéra Comique, but it was sold out on the web. Nevertheless, we showed up for a matinee and were able to buy two tickets in the fourth row center for list price, 37 euros each. It was the story of Josephine Baker and the history of jazz in New Orleans, complete with a real New Orleans jazz band, the Hot Stompers, which played for the crowd at intermission (11 Mb movie). One of the musicians normally played at the Napoleon House, the same place Brian and Ginger got married last year. I saw ads for An Inconvenient Truth in French, anti-global warming ads in the Metro, and an exhibit of original Dylan photos. I bought a poster for 5 euros, which is now hanging in my office.
In February we visited my father and Hanne in Bluffton, SC, and then drove to a conference on wind power in Charleston. Here we are in front of a tree covered with moss and here is an alligator neighbor of theirs. Hanne and Pa saw us off in front of their house. We also visited Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia, with another Peace Corps buddy, Paul Rodell, and then went to a nice restaurant for dinner. In Charleston, we visited Fort Sumter, with its cannons and the view back to Charleston.
In March, we spent Spring Break in Cuba. We visited my former student, Juan Carlos Antuña and his family in Camagüey, where I gave a lecture and discussed ongoing research with him. In Havana, we stayed at the Hotel Nacional, a well-preserved relic from colonial times, where we stayed in the same room where Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner spent their honeymoon. We saw lots of old cars, lots of anti-American propaganda, and were able to see a cigar factory outside of town. Our trip was legal, as we were both conducting scholarly activities there. We traveled through México, and had planned to return to Newark, but the airport was closed by a snowstorm. On the way back, we were forced to spend one night in Cancún and then got the last seats on a USA3000 charter flight to Hartford, Connecticut, where it took the Customs agents an hour and a half to figure out that what we did was legal. We had to rent a car and drive back to Newark to get our car. I went to the trouble to make a slide show of the trip and you can download it here to see all the pictures (28 Mb). It was fascinating, my second time and Sherri's first, and we both hope the economic situation there can be improved soon. The people were very nice, but I felt like I was visiting a prison, with everybody standing around waiting for something to happen. While they hoped for improvement, it seemed that they were also afraid of what the future might hold. Clearly a change in our policy toward Cuba, opening it up to American travelers and business, would accelerate change there.
I visited Athens in April. It is in Ohio and I gave a talk on global warming at Ohio University. I also attended UCAR University Relations Committee Meeting in Monterey, California in April. Sherri joined me in San Francisco the weekend before where we spent time with Brian and Ginger. Then I drove down the coast, and before the meeting I drove south through Big Sur to have lunch at one of my favorite restaurants (for the view, not the food), Nepenthe.
In May, Sherri, Dan and I went to
Acapulco, México, for the Spring AGU Meeting, and then to México City for four
days. Acapulco is past its prime, but México City is very interesting,
where I gave a lecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM),
the biggest university in the world (270,000 students), and we visited the
archeological museum, Trotsky's house, Frida Kahlo's house, the pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacán (where Dan
had his picture taken with Miss Indonesia), and saw the Ballet Folklórico and
even some naked protesters. We did see the cliff divers, the old fort, and
an exhibit on the Manila Galleon trade in Acapulco. Again, you can see a
slide show on the trip here (20 Mb).
In Italy I attended the IUGG meeting in Perugia, Italy. It was the most poorly organized meeting I have ever attended. The schedule was not posted until just before the meeting, so nobody could plan ahead which part to attend. The posters were in a basement on the other side of the city from the University, so were very poorly attended. We signed up for a post-conference tour of volcanoes, but they posted the wrong description of the trip on the web, few signed up, and it was cancelled. We had already bought our plane tickets to stay in Italy after the meeting, so we designed our own tour to Sorrento, on Naples Bay and near Vesuvius and the Amalfi Coast. And we spent one day in Rome just before coming home, during which we saw the Coliseum, the Forum, St. Peter's, and the Pantheon. At St. Peter's we saw the Pietà and the Swiss Guards. The food was great, e.g., seafood in Sorrento and pizza quatro stagioni in Rome, and there was a jazz festival in Perugia, where we saw Solomon Burke and Sly and the Family Stone. There is something wrong with Sly, and he could hardly sing or play. We went to Assisi for a day with Gera and Tanya Stenchikov, where we saw the cathedral complete with monks. Here is a nice picture of Gera and Tanya in a garden along the way and another near the cathedral. In Perugia we attended a cooking school that had been the site for the C-8 conference. We met my former postdoc, Suxia Liu, her husband Xingguo Mo, and their son. One day we took the Circumvesuviano train from Sorrento for a day in Pompeii. It was my first time there, and I was shocked at what a big, developed city it was. Of course, we saw the bodies trapped by the pyroclastic flow, and the brothel, with different positions on a "menu" like at a fast-food restaurant.
In August my father once again took the family to the same Club Med in the
Bahamas, Columbus Isle, where we first began the family
vacations 7 years ago. We were worried that it would not be as wonderful
as the first time, but it was.
Hurricane Dean missed us, and although it was very hot, we played tennis,
went snorkeling,
kayaking, and water skiing, ate, and
Lisa, Sherri, and Stephie even sang karaoke.
My father played tennis and even
won an award. Steve
(Lisa's husband) and I won the doubles tournament. Here are
most of the kids, the Bartram girls,
Max and Jerry, Jerry and
Stephie, Brian and Ginger,
Lisa and Steve, and Dan, Lisa,
Emily, and Allison in the pool.
In August, the Discovery Channel (home of our new favorite TV show, Cash Cab) flew me to Bozeman to visit Yellowstone Park to do an interview for an upcoming show (see above). I had never been there before, and got to see Old Faithful, which people waited to see erupt, the beautiful Old Faithful Inn, steaming volcanic hot springs, some of which flowed down to the river, bison, and remnants of a forest fire 20 years ago, the smoke of which I had used to study nuclear winter. Here is the crew getting their equipment ready, the producer Hannah James conferring with the Ranger, and the crew setting up.
I also went to Boulder in October for the annual UCAR meetings. It was great to see old friends in Boulder and many attending the meetings.
Brian Toon and I were offered a chance to publicize our nuclear winter results at a meeting of the IPPNW at the Royal Society of Medicine in London in October, where they had harp music at the conference dinner. The people attending were impressed, but it does not seem to have turned into any additional notice in the world yet. However, I got to visit the British Museum, to attend We Will Rock You, a musical based on the music of Queen, and to wait in the Emirates Lounge at the airport - far more luxurious than Continental's Presidents Club.
I visited State College in November. It is in Pennsylvania, and I gave talks on geoengineering and nuclear winter. I also attended a very interesting conference in New Orleans in November on "Preparing for Climate Change Liability." I gave a summary of the science of climate change, but all the others were lawyers, judges, and insurance and business people, who are preparing for, or already, suing people for damages from climate change. They are all convinced that global warming is real, and are considering issues like whether oil and coal companies will be liable for continuing to sell their products now that they know the consequences, or how to price insurance for carbon sequestration to deal with the pond on Granny Jones' farm that starts to bubble after CO2 is pumped into a nearby oil well. I again went to the AGU Meeting in San Francisco in December, where Elif presented our poster. Sherri joined me and we went house shopping with Brian and Ginger. It is shocking how expensive houses are in the Bay Area, and in their price range they will have to live far from downtown or in a very small place. It is too bad they can't afford a house in Sausalito, where they live now. Brian said goodbye to us at the airport
I saw Bob Dylan for the 39th time in June, this time with Sherri at the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City. It was a strange place to see him, but it was a good concert, and we even won a few bucks on the slot machines. I continue to be a fan of his weekly Theme Time Radio Hour on XM radio, which I record. If you want to listen, please let me know. And after a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat at my father's, Sherri and I drove down to Lincoln Center and saw I'm Not There, the Todd Haynes movie using 6 different actors to portray different times in Dylan's life. It was fabulous, and I highly recommend it, especially the performance by Cate Blanchett. Sherri even liked it.
Wisconsin did not go to the Rose Bowl again this year, but will be in the Outback Bowl on January 1, 2008. Wisconsin beat Michigan this year, which was enough to make a fabulous season.
May your 2008 be a healthy and fulfilling one. Happy New Year!
Love,
Alan and Sherri