In February last year, Brian Toon and I were successful in getting an op-ed published in the New York Times, “Let’s End the Peril of Nuclear Winter,”  We were thrilled, but we didn’t think anyone read it or paid attention.  But then in May, 2016 I got an invitation from Richard Clarke, former National Security Advisor, to meet him in New York City for an interview.  He told me he read the op-ed and was writing a book and wanted to know about my work on nuclear winter.  A year later, after I had forgotten about the interview, I got a call out of the blue from him saying he had written the book, Warnings, with R. P. Eddy, and I was Chapter 13.  The book is about Cassandras.  (Remember she was cursed with the gift of prophecy, but nobody believed her.)  The first half is about people who warned of tragedies that happened, and nobody paid attention.  The second half, which I am in, is about people who are warning of tragedies in the future.  Jim Hansen, warning about global warming, is Chapter 12.  I was flattered to be included, and hope the chapter has some influence.  And it led to three invitations.  The first one was to do a video with Dick and R.P. to promote the book, and then have dinner at The Brook, R.P.’s private club in Manhattan, which has original portraits of George Washington and Ben Franklin on the walls.  I had to wear a jacket and tie (with R.P. on the left and Dick on the right), and it was a very interesting experience to rub elbows with people I usually do not meet.  For example, I heard, “I’m in charge of the Jockey Club.”  “I work for a hedge fund.”  “I’m a publisher.”  The second was to come to the Hamptons in June and make a presentation about my chapter (here with Jim Hansen and R.P.) to a meeting of money managers.  They were not as dressed up, but it was still people I usually do not meet.  Sherri and I had never been to the Hamptons, and it was an interesting trip.  The third was to come to New York in January, 2018 and make a presentation on Global Flashpoints.  Again, it is an opportunity to educate people about the threat of nuclear weapons, and maybe something will come of it.

   My TEDx talk on nuclear winter now has 13,937 views so far, I have 1285 followers on Twitter, and now have 10 Huffington Post blogs.  Let’s see if social media can really change the world.

    Things continue to go well at Rutgers.   I taught three course this Fall, on climate change to seniors, on climate modeling to graduate students, and on how to live a good life to a freshman seminar.  It was fun, except for the grading.  I will not teach in the Spring and will take a sabbatical this coming academic year, so no more teaching for a while.  I will travel to several conferences, spend some time at NCAR and the Univ. of Colorado working on nuclear winter, geoengineering, and volcanic eruptions, and some time at Tulane so we can be with the grandkids.

    I am working on my National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to study the impacts of volcanic eruptions on seasonal and decadal climate, and to work on geoengineering. Two of my graduate students, Corey Gabriel and Brian Zambri completed their Ph.D.s this year with me.  Corey is now working at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Brian will continue with me as a postdoc for a while.  Lili Xia continues to work with me on geoengineering and is now a Research Associate at Rutgers.  And I have three new graduate students working with me on the nuclear winter grant.  Altogether in 2017, I published 7 refereed journal articles, with 4 in press, and 6 other articles.  It has been another productive year.  If you are interested in more information or want to read them, visit my home page and click on Publications.

     I have to say that the Trump administration has been a great success so far, because there has been no nuclear war.  Everything else is minor.  And I am heartened by the overwhelming victories by the Democrats in Virginia and Alabama, not to mention New Jersey, where we will finally have a new governor.

     We took lots of great trips this year, particularly one to Spain, Andorra, and France in May, and one in August to Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming, which included Mt. St. Helens, the eclipse, and Yellowstone.  At the end of January, I spent a week in Bern, Switzerland at meeting on stratospheric sulfur, where we began plans for a Chapman Conference in Tenerife, which we will attend in March next year.  In February, I went to a great workshop at Stanford on U.S. Engagement in the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons Debate, organized by Prof. Scott Sagan.  There were many impressive people there, including Bob Kehler, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, and Bill Perry, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and now an anti-nuclear activist.  The political scientists there seemed stunned by how effective ICAN was being on their way to a UN treaty to ban nuclear weapons - it was a push from civil society making an end run around all the established way of doing things.  And it gave me great information to help me write my proposal to Open Philanthropy which ended up getting me my grant.  Stanford has a beautiful campus and interesting old downtown.  While there we had lunch in Sausalito with Bob Bornstein and his family.

     In March, I went to a geoengineering forum in DC, and Sherri came with me to see the cherry blossoms.  We walked around the Tidal Basin, and on the way back to the hotel, we walked by the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.  She had tried to get tickets, but although they are free, they had been booked months in advance.  It was about 4 p.m. and there were no lines so I walked up to the door and asked the guard if we could come in.  He said with no tickets we could not.  As we walked away, he stopped us and said, “Let me ask you one thing.  Are you a Veteran?”  I said, “Not of the military, but I was a Peace Corps Volunteer.”  “Really,” he said.  “Come on in!”  I think this is the only time I got a direct benefit from having been in the Peace Corps.  (Of course, I have derived many benefits in my life from the experience.)  We rushed through, and the best thing I saw was Chuck Berry’s red Cadillac.

     In May we went to a Past Global Changes meeting in Zaragoza, Spain, a place we had never been to before.  It has a spectacular catheral along the river, and you can go to one of the spires for a panoramic view of the city.  We had huge pizzas at an outdoor restaurant, but did not avail ourselves of the New Orleans Grand McExtreme at the McDonalds.  Zaragoza was OK, but then we spent 4 days in Barcelona, which was spectacular.  We went to Park Güell, designed by Gaudi as part of a housing development that never developed.  It has spectacular stairs, views, walkways, and whatever this is.  Barcelona has interesting sculptures along the seaside, interesting food from the sea, old Roman walls, and Catalan flags everywhere.  The red and yellow is the normal flag, and the blue triangle with a star is copied from the Cuban flag, to make this flag a symbol of revolution from Spain.  Of course, the most spectacular Gaudi creation is the Sagrada Familia, still under construction.  The arches inside are spectacular, as are the decorations on top.  We took an elevator to the top, but has to spiral down.  The stained glass windows start with red on one side and fade to blue on the other.  They actually have it very well organized.  We reserved an entry time online, including an audio guide, and it was not crowded when we toured.  In fact, when I first made the reservation I was confused by their calendar which starts on Monday on the left side.  When I realized I had gotten tickets for the wrong day, I emailed them, and they instantly changed them to the correct day for no charge.

    We left Spain to drive to Andorra, a place we had never been.  It has a small downtown with interesting sculpture, and we ended up at the best restaurant of the entire trip, Don Denis, recommended by our hotel.  I got a 40-escargot appetizer, and we enjoyed crepes suzettes for desert.  The rest was great, too.  The drive to France from there presented stunning views, up and down the valley, and they even had an outdoor giant chair museum.  We stayed at a hotel just outside the Carcassone castle (our view at breakfast), which we visited in the evening on the way to a cassoulet dinner (not as good as I had remembered).   It was my second, but Sherri’s first, visit there.  Then we went on to a beautiful seaside fishing village of Collioure.  It is hard to capture how charming it is with pictures, but our first lunch was delicious.  Here is the view from the breakwater at the harbor entrance.  Inside the old castle, we even discovered a painting of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the last leaving from the Collioure harbor in 1493.

     In June, we headed to Nag’s Head for our niece Heather’s wedding.  The entire Carpini clan was there.  We took Danny and Vivi back with us to New Jersey, where many Dannys and Vivis appeared.  We took them to the beach several times, where they really dug it, built a volcano, and helped lifeguard. Danny showed us how to use the monkey bars, of which he was very proud, when he was not doing Minecraft on his iPad.  They both served as a pillow, as did I.  We then headed to Jerry’s for a party for Zach and Jen, about to be parents, taking Danny and Vivi with us and seeing lots of family, not forgetting to take the obligatory picture of Jerry, Lisa, and me.  I then headed to Vienna for a short trip on agricultural modeling, where I went to the Opera, and suffered through it for a while (the orchestra was great).  I had dinner with friend Ulli the night before I left.  After our trip to the Hamptons, and on our way to the Dylan concert (see below) we had lunch at the CIA and visited Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s home near Hyde Park.

     In July, I went to Maine to attend the Gordon Research Conference on Climate Engineering that I had organized, and a side meeting on our GeoMIP project.  I had time to visit a covered bridge.  The conference dinner was at the top of a mountain, with all the lobster you could eat.  Piers Forster (third from left) had four, but it did not come close to the GRC record.

     Our trip out West in August produced amazing sights.  We saw Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams from the air landing in Portland, had dinner with Mara Sherman, Gene’s daughter, who lives in Portland, and then went to Mt. St. Helens on the conference field trip.  Here am I this year with Sherri and 37 years ago with Cliff Mass at the volcano whose eruption helped get me tenure.  We drove to eastern Washington where we had dinner with my former student Ben Kravitz and his wife Robin, and where I gave a talk on nuclear winter at the Hanford laboratory where the plutonium was made for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki and many more for decades later.  After visiting the actual reactor, I had to fortify myself with radioactive beer in town.  On our way to see the eclipse, we also visited the first nuclear reactor that generated electricity, in this octagonal structure inside, and, of course, the Idaho Potato Museum.  The eclipse was spectacular, and pictures cannot do it justice.  We waited along a road under the path of totality and I was able to take a picture directly with my camera.  With binoculars it was easy to see Mercury, the small dot to the left and down from the Sun.  The horizon was pink all around.  I used our glasses to take this picture of a notch in the Sun as it was ending.  At Yellowstone we saw the usual great sites, including the Sapphire Pool, a multicolored pool, a red river, Lower Yellowstone Falls, Old Faithful, a bison, an elk, and the Old Faithful Inn, where we stayed.

     In October I went to a geoengineering meeting in Berlin along with Sherri and our friend Tony Snyder, and met Ulli Pechinger there.  I pointed at Karl Marx’s quotation on the stairs at Humboldt University.  We dined at the top of the Reichstag and at an outdoor Octoberfest, and enjoyed the light show on the TV tower at Potsdamer Platz.  Meanwhile, Sherri and Tony went to the Pergamon Museum, and with Ulli hung out at Alexanderplatz.

     In December, at the Fall AGU Meeting in New Orleans, I took the grandkids to see and buy rocks, they smiled in front of the Christmas tree, Vivi was an angel, blew out candles at one birthday party and wore a hat at another, and Danny played with the monkey at the zoo.  Danny loves rocks, and may be famous someday.  There was music one night at a reception at Mardi Gras World.  Sherri read books to the kids one night.  Here’s the best picture we were able to get of the four of us, or maybe it was this one.

     We had nice get-togethers with local friends, including for Tony’s retirement and for Ron and Cyndi’s 40th wedding anniversary.  We joined Kostya and his family to celebrate his 78th birthday.  In December, we went to meet the newest member of our family, Ben Robock, here with his parents, Jen and my nephew Zach.  Here are Alan and Ben and Jerry, and Ben with Sherri and me.

    Our solar panels (photovoltaic, shown here with our hybrids and a rainbow) continue to work well.  Here is an updated graph of our electric bill for the past few years.  It is still easy to see when we turned the solar panels on.  SRECs are now $0.20 per kWh plus we get the electricity, worth another $0.12 per kWh.  Not only have we not paid an electric bill in years, but we make money on the deal and emit no CO₂ for our electricity generation.  I know, all my flying cancels this out, but at least I feel good about being green.  I have plans to buy a Tesla Model 3 next year and eliminate my auto CO₂ emissions, too.

    We saw Bob Dylan in June at an old brickyard along the Hudson, repurpossed as a concert venue.  It was great, my 47th.  I was not able to get a picture of Bob, but did see his tour bus leaving our hotel.   I also enjoyed the annual Bobfest in Red Bank, on Bob’s birthday.  In March we saw Arlo Guthrie playing keyboards and guitar, at a double bill with Taj Mahal.  We also saw Arlo in November, here presenting flowers from the audience to his daughter.  In April, we saw Christine Lavin, playing guitar, twirling batons, and expounding on science.

   We did not go to a Wisconsin football game this year, but they did extremely well, 12-0, and only just lost the Big Ten Championship.  They will be playing in the Orange  Bowl on December 30.

Sherri:  My 2017 saw my 50th college reunion at William and Mary, the wedding of my niece, Heather, in Nags Head, where we had a family reunion of sisters, brother, kids, cousins and a one-week in a ten-bedroom “cottage” at the beach. Along with other travel and treats, including being able to spend it with my best friend and hubby, Alan, I am really delighted with the “best” in my life. This picture is from the January 21st Women’s March on Washington—where I layered up and ordered an extra-big tee-shirt (and the hat proudly adorns the headrest in my Prius).  The day was long and cold but “she persisted,” to coin a phrase, and saw some pretty other funny/satirical signs to go along with ours.  My political resistance has also led me to join some local groups, participated in other local protests, and I’ll probably travel to NYC or Morristown for a repeat of last year’s march.  As I’m sure have many of you, I’ve written letters and called, even spoken at a rally to vote out our Congressman, and will continue to be active this coming year. 

     Fortunate to keep in touch with many of my Pi Phi sorority sisters, we organized a 50^th reunion, many of us staying at Cedars B&B, just across from the campus.  Along with updating each other on our lives, we enjoyed the festivities, including the Olde Guarde celebration.  Before that, I visited my sisters in Hampton and Newport News and their families.  My brother, Tom, has recently moved from Missouri to Surry, VA, so I plan to see all of the family more this year.

     I took my first Road Scholar trip with one of my good friends, Anne Prudente, to Monterey, CA, where we spent a week enjoying the warm, beautiful vibes of the peninsula, toured Carmel with an expert guide, listened to John Steinbeck and Jack London re-enactors, sampled wine from a local vineyard, and spent our last weekend in Sausalito where we saw son Dan and the kids’ former babysitter, Marylou, who still sends us greetings from time to time.  My former sister-in-law, Cheryl, was supposed to join us, but Hurricane Irma had other plans, so Anne and I had to enjoy the experience for her—and we did! 

     Dan is still living in San Rafael, is now a “supergun,” or associate manager at a Nuggets Supermarket in Corte Madera, and still spoiling his dog, Molly.  We were lucky to see him not only there but also in North Carolina, and he came a few days earlier to spend time with us and friends in New Jersey, as well as our trip last February.  But Dan is a California guy now—talking the organic food talk and I’m just waiting for him to start taking yoga! 

     Brian has had a rough year, separating from Ginger this past September, but living in a townhouse close to Danny’s school (7331 Hickory St., New Orleans, 70118), and continues to work at inXile, a game company in New Orleans.  I helped him set up his place in early September, and then spent some time with him and the kids throughout last year on several occasions.  My “inner kid” really shines with them around, and, while it’s exhausting to keep up with them at times, Danny, now 7 and in the first grade, and Vivi, now 5 and in her last year of pre-school as a “Dalmation,” are delights.  During the most recent visit, for example, I gave them my Gandhi doll, which I used to take to class when I discussed the Mahatma.  I also found a children’s book which I began to read to them, and they were entranced, but even more so by the Michael Jackson book that I also bought due to a question from Danny about how he died.  After a few pages of this particular book, I realized that the book was for an older child, as Michael’s early life was a difficult one, but remembered that I had some of his music on my iPhone, so the kids had a great time trying to do the moon walk to the sounds of “Billy Jean” and “Thriller”—and, of course I danced like a fool along with them.  Since they live close to the zoo and pools, we spent a bit of time there, along with walking to see the turtle pond at Tulane and eating “dumplings,” their favorite food!  This year we hope to plan a family vacation, maybe in Hawaii, and for them to visit the NJ shore again when the weather is warm.

     I still continue to volunteer for Meals on Wheels, am the new Chair of the Monmouth Human Relations Commission, tutor at a GED program as part of Brookdale Community College, and am training as a docent at the college’s Holocaust and Genocide education center for an upcoming program on genocide.  My television career continues to expand with my participation in a League of Women Voters “Facts & Issues” program on Islam, which can double as a sleep aid.  Along with exercising my body and my mouth, with frequent lunch trips with friends, I find I remain busy and active, and am enjoying life, even if I’m not as close to my grandkids as I’d like to be.

     Have a healthy, and happy 2018 and do get in touch if you’re in the area.  Please come visit the Jersey Shore, and wishing you and yours health and happiness.

May your 2018 be a healthy and fulfilling one.  Happy New Year