With no action on global warming, geoengineering continues to be a hot topic.  I gave invited talks about it this year in Mexico City to the Mexican Academy of Sciences in January, in Berkeley in January, in Iceland in June, Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia) in September, and in San Francisco at the AGU Meeting in December.

   We continued to enjoy living in Sausalito until we left for Marrakesh in April.  The best part was playing with Little Man, who slept over many a night.  We visited the Coit Tower in San Francisco (shaped like a fire hose nozzle to honor the firefighters who fought the fire after the 1906 earthquake) which contains leftist murals painted to make work during the Depression.  We then watched a fabulous sunset at Ocean Beach, the same place Brian surfs.  When Ian and Norma visited, we took a hike up above the Golden Gate Bridge, and then Ian and I met Bob Bornstein for coffee and then walked to the Palace of Fine Arts.  When Lisa and Steve Bartram visited, Steve and I visited the old defensive emplacements in the above the Golden Gate bridge, with views of the Golden Gate Bridge and out to the Marin Headlands.  Lisa is now Deputy Mayor of Encinidas, California, after winning her Town Council election.  I'm sure she'll do a great job.

    One day, Sherri and I hike out to the Tennessee Valley beach, with beautiful cliffs.  The scenery from our apartment included some of the biggest ships in the world entering San Francisco Bay, and the full moon rising over the Berkeley Hills with windows reflecting the setting Sun.  Bob Chervin visited at night, and we continued to enjoy beautiful sunrises.  Birds liked to perch on the remains of the old ferry docks right in front of our place.  Little Danny loved to play with switches and kitchen implements, and big Danny celebrated his birthday.  When the fishing fleet showed up for several days to catch herring, the birds and seals loved it and ate what the fishermen did not take away.  And we enjoyed cookouts in Brian and Ginger's back yard.  We took Little Man to play in one of the most scenic playgrounds in the world.  He liked the slide, and I liked watching him.  And we took Bob Bornstein and his wife Sureyya out for his 70th birthday.  Sherri and I visited Treasure Island.

    We began the year in Sausalito, California, on sabbatical, and on January 2 left for Hawaii for me to attend a conference in Honolulu, and then for vacation on Maui.  Our friends Tony Snyder and Ron and Cyndi Sopenoff, who had never been to Hawaii before, came with us and we were able to show them a good time.  The most exiting was going whale watching in a small yellow rubber boat.  Not only did whales come to greet us, but I was able to make a great movie of two of them (71 Mb) playing right next to the boat.  We went to the top of Haleakala, where the silversword grows.  We visited the King Kamehameha Golf Course Clubhouse, a building originally designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Marilyn Monroe, and had nice sunset dinners.

   In January, I attended the Mexican Academy of Sciences annual meeting in the outskirts of Mexico City.  The people there were nice, but the city was polluted and crowded, and I got an eye infection.  I was able to go to the Zócalo with my friend Ramaswamy, where we visited the Templo Mayor, an Aztec temple upon which the Spanish built their city.  The museum has pottery, the God of Death, and even a portrait of Alexander von Humboldt.

    At the end of January I went to the Univ. of Alabama, Huntsville for a couple days to give a talk on volcanic eruptions and climate.  The airport had the most pro-military propaganda I have ever seen - such a contrast from the Left Coast where I was living.  I really enjoyed the NASA U.S. Space & Rocket Center, with a full-size Saturn V, models of all the rocket engines they developed there, and an interesting exhibit on Wernher von Braun, who came there with 100 German rocket engineers after World War II to start our rocket program.  They were used both by the military and for space exploration.  He is a great hero in Hunstville, but the trip reminded me of Tom Lehrer's song about him:

            Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
            A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience.
            Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.
            "Ha, Nazi schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.

            Don't say that he's hypocritical.
            Say rather that he's apolitical.
            "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down.
            That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

    In February I attended the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, BC.  It is a great city to visit, and I took a walking tour (in the rain).  I saw the famous Steam Clock, people swimming in the rain, and float planes landing and taking off with ski runs in the background across the harbor.  My term as Retiring Chair of the Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Sciences Section ended.  I tried to do what I could to give the volunteers in each section more power in the organization, but the way it is organized was against us, and it was rather frustrating.  At the end of February, I spend a couple days in Boulder at the UCAR Board of Trustees meeting.

    In March our friend Kathy Hjelle came to visit and we took nice hikes to Mt. Tamalpais, with views back to San Francisco, with the fog rolling through the Golden Gate, and up above the Golden Gate Bridge.  Later in the month, Gene and Ellen visited and we spent the weekend in Napa Valley, where we tasted wine and visited the Jack London State Park, where he had lived and built a house, which burned down just before he moved in.  Sarah and Liron, Ian and Norma's daughter and son-in-law came over for dinner.  Gene and I actually saw a whale in the bay in front of out place.  At the end of March I attended a meeting on our GeoMIP project in Exeter, England, a nice place on the south coast.
   
    In the beginning of April, Sherri and I went with Brian, Ginger, and Danny to Yosemite, the first time any of them had been there.  The waiter at the Awahnee Lodge gave us special treatement, because he liked my Obama shirt.  We had nice weather, and Little Man was a great traveller in his first long car trip - 6 hours on the way there and 4 hours back.

    In the middle of April I attended an IPCC Lead Authors Meeting in Marrakech, Morocco.  It was our first trip to Morocco, and we stayed for another week. At the conference banquet, Sherri made friends with the hosts. On the way to Essaouria on the coast, we saw goats in a tree.  The fishing boats led to nice meals.  We drove through the Rose Valley, and ended up riding camels into the beautiful desert on the southeast border next to Algeria. The ride was 2 1/2 hours each way out to where we camped for the night.  Riding a camel is very uncomfortable, and I was sore for a week afterwards.   But the night sky was fabulous, with no light pollution and dry air.  We saw the Milky Way, the Space Station go by, and numerous smaller satellites.

    In May, I spend several days in Bergen, Norway, the birthplace of modern meteorology.  I was invited to participate in a joint Norwegian-Cuban project on meteorology research because of my Cuban connections, and I was able to take my friend and former student Juan Carlos Antuña on a trip on the Sognefjord, by train and then by boat back to Bergen, where we saw huge boats in the harbor.  The flowers were out in Bergen, as were the Hell's Angels.  I went to the art museum, where I saw an exhibit of paintings by Edvard Munch, including his self-portrait.  Who knew he looked more like a businessman than an artist?  Later this summer we saw a 3-D version of his most famous painting, The Scream, at the Trenton Grounds for Sculpture.  I love it because of the volcanic sunset in the sky.  It was painted in 1893, based on the sunsets he saw in 1883 after the Krakatau eruption.
    I am looking forward to the next meeting in March next year in Havana.  My photo is now in the Historical Gallery next to the bar in the Hotel Nacional, and I look forward to seeing it in person.

    I organized an AGU Chapman Conference on Volcanism and the Atmosphere, which was held in Selfoss, Iceland in June.  It was well-attended (130 people), and we had nice field trips to the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which had erupted in 2011, as well as to bubbling mud and waterfalls. We even stopped by the Blue Lagoon.  Here I am with Steve Self, Mike Mann, and Phil Jones, and here with Gera Stenchikov and Hans Graf.

    I went to Boulder at the end of June for a UCAR Nominations Committee meeting, and watched helicopters dropping water on the fires in the mountains during the meeting.  At times, I could smell smoke in the city.

    In July we drove my trusty Prius from California back to New Jersey.  In Nevada, I thought I was seeing my first tornado, but it was just a rain shaft.  In Idaho, we visited the Craters of the Moon National Monument, a volcanic region part of the same system that produced Yellowstone.  We climbed one of the small cones, overlooking spatter cones and surrounding landscape. My car picked up some sagebrush.  Looking for lunch afterwards, we happened upon Arco, Idaho, the first city to be electrified with nuclear power.  The theme continued with Pickle's Place, home of the Atomic Burger and fried pickles.  Next we took a straight road to Yellowstone, home of steaming rivers that you could walk up to, the fabulous Yellowstone Lodge, the Beehive Geyser, and of course Old Faithful, which we had time to have a picture in front of and observe the leftover water and steam.  We crossed the Continental Divide and saw bison from a distance and steaming mud.  On the way out of the park, we found a bison walking up the road, right between the cars, and heading toward us.  Wyoming has beautiful red and stone bluffs, but also ugly oil wells and coal trains.  When I met the Governor in October, he bragged the state is known for minerals (euphemism for coal and oil), tourism, and agriculture, and we were able to see all three on the drive to Devil's Tower on the other side of the state.  We walked around it, seeing it from this angle and this and this, and then refreshed ourselves with its beer.  It was memorable, to see Yellowstone, drive across Wyoming, and see Devil's Tower all in one day.

    The next day we passed a toasted marshmallow farm on a long road to North Dakota, but we went because it was the only state I had not visited before.  In North Dakota, horses stand on top of hills, people drive Corvettes, and only eat with dead animals on the wall.  We saw wind turbine blades on the highway, and it was quite green and wet even though it was 102°F outside.  We crossed the Missouri River as we entered Bismarck, where we visited the State Capitol and saw statues to Sacagawea and bison.  But they have strange restaurants.  As we drove by Madison, we got a call from Hanne that my father had been taken to the hospital, and a couple days after we got home we had to go down to South Carolina to spend his last days with him.

    In August I spent a couple days in the Rockies at a UCAR retreat, where we discussed the future of NCAR, took a hayride, and roasted marshmallows.  I also spent a week there in October at the annual UCAR meetings, including the opening ceremony of the new NCAR Wyoming Supercomputer Center.  In the distance you can see wind turbines, which partially power it.  The computers are 30 times more powerful than the existing NCAR computers, and my students are already making use of them.  I even got to meet Governor Matt Mead of Wyoming at a reception at his mansion the night before.

    Our solar panels (photovoltaic) continue to work well, except for when one array was blown across the roof by Sandy.  But it is fixed now.  Here is an updated graph of our electric bill for the past few years.  It is easy to see when we turned it on.

     We went to Madison to see the Michigan State game with our friends and my old college roommates, Gene and Ian and their wives Ellen and Norma.  We drank beer and posed in front of the stadium.  See if you can find three Barry's in the photo.

    I was able to get us on the last flight from Milwaukee home on the day before Sandy hit.  We were without power for five days, with no TV, internet, or phone for 11 days.  But we were lucky, only losing one solar array, which was taken down a couple days later and has already been repaired.  A tree just across the street came down (but the Obama sign was not blown away, a good omen), taking the electrical lines and the pole, as well as the pole up the street.  Boats were blown onto the shore and onto the road to Manasquan beach.  But crews from South Carolina showed up the next day, putting the lines back up.  Still the road to the beach was closed for weeks, some people near the ocean lost their houses and the contents, and our favorite boardwalk in Sea Girt was destroyed, but the benches were saved.

    I attended the Fall AGU Meeting in December.  Juan Carlos was able to come, and we showed him Sausalito.  I went for sushi with Lori and Gera, as is our custom at Isobune.  The Editor's Dinner was at the City Club, which has a fabulous Diego Rivera mural, Riches of California, painted in 1931.  In December we visited my cousin David and went to an End of the World party on Dec. 21, but it turned out to be only a celebration of the winter solstice.