PEACE IN THE NEW YEAR

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Alan:   I'm still very excited about having Barack Obama as my President.  It is so great to have a President who is so intelligent and who shares most of my values.  We were able to get tickets to the inauguration, but because Sherri broke her kneecap in December, 2008, we did not think it would be easy for her to get around on foot, so we watched with great pleasure on TV.  One of the most memorable parts was the concert the day before, in which Pete Seeger, along with Bruce and a number of others, sang This Land is Your Land, and he sang all the verses, including the one that goes, "As I went walking, I spied a sign, and on that sign it said 'Private Property.'  But on the other side, it didn't say nothin'.  That side was made for you and me!"  And Obama and his family were sitting there enjoying it!  The world has really changed for the better.

    One of the great things about Obama is that he both wants to listen to scientists and he wants to support scientists.  He wants to make decisions based on the right information rather than the politics of those who give him the most money.  He appointed excellent scientists to positions of power, including John Holdren as his Science Advisor, Jane Lubchenco to head NOAA, Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy, Lisa Jackson (actually an engineer) to head EPA, and Marcia McNutt to head USGS.  And he substantially boosted support for scientific research.  The stimulus bill had an extra $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, more than half the annual budget.  And the annual budget has also gone up, with an extra $200 million per year for climate research, the largest new NSF program ever.  I thought that with Obama and a Democratic Congress that science funding would at least stop decreasing, but I never imagined it would go up so fast.  Other agencies that support my work saw boosts, but not as big as to NSF.  And I got a new NSF grant funded by the stimulus money, so I am certainly stimulated.

     The biggest problem in the world is still nuclear weapons.  And Obama gets it.  As far as I am concerned, he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for making a push to reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals and move on to try to stop proliferation.  Brian Toon and I continue to try to get attention for our work, and published a paper on nuclear winter in the January, 2010 issue of Scientific American.  We hope people will notice.

    The most traumatic event of 2009 was my 60th birthday.  Sherri arranged a surprise party for me a couple weeks before my birthday, and I was completely surprised.  It was wonderful how many people came to help me celebrate.  Ian got the award for coming the farthest, but Anna Vinnikova came from Richmond with her father Kostya from Maryland.  Dian and Steve Seidel, and my cousin Laura and her husband Bill, also came from Maryland.  Laura, Bill, and their son Sam ended up staying with us that night. My Russian cousins were all there.  It was all arranged by Sherri, with help from Dan and hosts George and Joan.  Unlike my 30th, 40th, and 50th, which I really enjoyed, both looking back on the past decade and forward to the next, this one seemed to me like the beginning of a long road downhill.  My 6th decade was fine, and I am healthy, but this one just felt different.

    As the American Meteorological Society/Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer for 2008-2009, I gave many talks about nuclear winter, climate change, and geoengineering in response to invitations at different colleges and universities.  In addition to the lectures at Washington College (Maryland) and SUNY Purchase College (New York) in 2008, in 2009 I gave talks at the University of South Dakota, South Dakota State University, the University of North Carolina-Asheville, Appalachian State University, the University of Northern Michigan, the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, Carnegie Mellon University, Ramapo College, Quinnipiac University, and Truman State University (Missouri).  It is rather grueling, but I was glad to be able to talk to people about my work, and they appreciated my visits.

    Things continue to go well at Rutgers.  But Gera Stenchikov surprised me at a party in January when he told me he was taking a position of Professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.  We gave Tanya and him a goodbye at my 60th birthday party.  They started there in August, and I saw them at a meeting in Hamburg, Germany, in November, and they seemed to be settling in there.  Sherri and I hope to visit them in 2010.

    Ben Kravitz continues to work with me on my geoengineering project funded by NSF.  I have received three new grants, one from NSF (with stimulus money) to study volcanic eruptions and the Arctic (with new student Mira Losic, starting in January, 2010), one from NASA to study remote sensing of soil moisture (with new student Tom Collow, starting in January, 2010), and one from EPA on the effects of climate change on allergic disease, in which I will collaborate with Dr. Leonard Bieleroy and others at Rutgers.  I published five refereed journal articles this year, and have five more submitted.  If you are interested in more information or want to read them, visit my home page and click on Publications.

  Geoengineering has been of great interest to the press and policy makers, and I testified at the first Congressional hearing on geoengineering on November 5, at the House Committee on Science and Technology Hearing, “Geoengineering:  Assessing the Implications of Large-Scale Climate Intervention,”  Here are a PDF file of testimony without supplemental material and a  PDF of my complete testimony (22 Mb).  You can even watch a webcast of testimony here.  In addition to the Sigma Xi lectures, I also gave invited talks about geoengineering this year at the University of Colorado, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (Paris), NOAA National Climatic Data Center (Asheville), American Physical Society Meeting (Denver), Lafayette College (Easton, Pennsylvania), University of Wisconsin (the Leonard Robock Memorial Lecture), Sierra Club (Philadelphia), and McGill University.

    I continue to serve as the Director of the Meteorology Undergraduate Program.  We continue to have many new students each year enroll who are interested in Meteorology.  We were able to establish a Living-Learning Community, which started this Fall, where Meteorology students live together and have access to a broadcast studio for regular weather broadcasts and feature presentations.

    We hired two new faculty members this year, Ben Lintner, who started in September, and Ann Marie Carlton, who will start in September, 2010.  Considering the economic situation, we feel very lucky about this.  And thanks to our union, unlike at other universities where faculty members were forced into furloughs or even salary reductions, we only delayed our 5.5% raises for nine months.

    I got several mentions in the press this year and was on the radio and TV.  On TV, I was on CNN twice in December discussing climate change, on American Morning on December 7 with Kiran Chetry, and with Campbell Brown on December 9, in a Wall Street Journal video interview, and Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) TV inerview by Skype.  The radio appearances were on a Paradise Parking Lot radio show, All Things Considered, Radio Times, and Radio Ecoshock. I or my work was mentioned multiple times in newspaper and magazine articles, including The Independent, Korzár, Corriere della Sera, Time, Novaator, Associate Press (printed in 195 newspapers), The Times (of Pakistan), The Daily Targum, Associated Press, Brick Township Bulletin, The Mining Journal, Nature News, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, Science Express, UPI, Público, San Francisco Chronicle, Science News, Kansas City Star, Miller-McCune Magazine, Counterpunch, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Vision, Environmental Science and Technology, MSNBC, Daily Kos, The Guardian, Scientific American, German TV, and Prospect Magazine.

    As President of the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) I once again organized a Chinese banquet at our Fall Meeting in December in San Francisco, but this time with background music and a slide show I put together of all our awardees and student presenters.  It was very successful, and we awarded the first Yoram Kaufman award to Ralph Kahn and Ross Salawitch, seen here with Warren Wiscombe (Past President), Anne Thompson (President-Elect), and Jean Kaufman, and to Simona Bordoni, who won the James Holton Award for young scientists.  I also organized the Bjerknes Lecture by Richard Alley, who packed a very large room and gave a great survey of how CO₂ is the dominant cause of climate change on all time scales.  Sherri came midweek and we saw Brian and Ginger and Bob and Sureyya, who are all doing fine.

    I received my Fellow award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in February at the annual meeting in Chicago.  Russ Dickerson nominated me, and was there to celebrate.  We also saw Al Gore give another fabulous talk urging scientists to get involved with policy.  AAAS is the largest scientific organization in the world, and publishes Science, but many people are not members, as they get Science for free through their organizations.  I also won the election for Chair-Elect of the Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences Section of AAAS.  This means I will be attending the annual meetings (in San Diego in 2010, Washington, DC, in 2011, and Vancouver, BC in 2012).  I also will be able to help organize sessions at the annual meeting and help to make sure that deserving section members become Fellows.  This year we were able to have 11 new Fellows elected from my section.

    Our solar panels (photovoltaic) continue to work well.  Here is a graph of our electric bill for the past few years.  It is easy to see when we turned it on.  We have saved about $2000/year on the bills and generated another $3300/year in renewable energy certificates which the electric company has to buy from us.  2009 was even better than 2008, with a cool summer so we used much less electricity for air conditioning.

    I think I set a new record in 2009, with 124,764 miles flown on Continental.  Dec. 31 found Sherri and me in Jaipur, India, and and that is why this letter is late this year.  We saw my former postdoc Srini and his wife Renu, who helped us arrange a tour and took us to dinner in Delhi.  But Delhi is the most polluted place I have ever been, with visibility less than half a mile (this is the Presidential Palace).  We could not see many sites, which disappeared into the murk.  Even in Agra, the Taj Mahal was hard to enjoy as the atmosphere was so dirty.  As soon as we stepped off the plane in Delhi, in the jetway, we could smell smoke, and there was open burning everywhere, to cook, burn trash, to keep warm and from smokestacks and diesel trucks.  Jaipur (right) had the cleanest air.  And we saw lots of animals: camels, elephants, monkeys, parrots, and lots of cows.  People made efficient use of motorcycles.  And they are rightly proud of Gandhi, who is on all the money.

   We did not go to any other exotic destinations in 2009, just a lot of trips in the U.S. and our now annual trip to Paris in March.  We stayed at a very nice apartment on the Île Saint Louis and took a Segway tour.  All the Sigma Xi trips are listed above.  In addition, I was in Boulder to give an invited lecture in January.  In February, I gave invited lectures at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Cal Tech, both in Pasadena.  In March, I went to a conference in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and my former student Dale Kaiser (here with his wife Terri) invited me to also give a talk at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  The town has an American Museum of Science and Technology documenting how they extracted the uranium for the first atomic bomb there, something they are very proud of.  I found it rather spooky.  But I did find the house in Knoxville where we lived from 1950-1954.  It is pretty small.

   In April I gave talks at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC, Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, and at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.  I also attended a UCAR Meeting in Miami.  In May, I gave a talk at the American Physical Society April Meeting in Denver, and Sherri and I went to Toronto for the AGU Meeting, the last Spring Meeting that AGU will have.  Later we went to Hampton, VA, to visit Sherri's family and Bruce and Susan.

    In June I attended a conference in Oxnard, California, and in July, Sherri and I visited Hyde Park, NY, Franklin Roosevelt's home and Presidential Library.  Franklin and Eleanor were happy to see me and Sherri.  We also stopped to visit Alan's cousin, David Kushner.

    In July, my former student, Juan Carlos Antuña, visited and we served him a lobster.  Then he and I and current student Ben Kravitz attended a Gordon Research Conference in New Hampshire, after which we visited Mt. Washington.  Mt. Washington is the highest mountain in New England and home of the highest recorded wind speed.  The train to the top has both coal and biodiesel engines now, clearly making the case for the new technology.  My Prius made it all the way to the top.  Also in July, Pa and Hanne came to visit for a weekend and we went to the beach and played tennis.

   But the most exciting thing I did in July was to see Barack Obama up close at a Corzine rally.  Unfortunately, Corzine lost in November, and we'll see how our new Governor does.  I don't think he will be able to do any better, but we will have to suffer under him for the next four years.  He promised to support higher education, which Corzine did not do very well.