PEACE IN THE NEW YEAR
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December 28, 2017 |
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Telephone: (732) 881-1610 (cell Alan), (732) 881-1609 (cell Sher) |
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Alan: The
2017 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
“for its work to draw attention to
the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.” I
was part of this, giving talks on Capital Hill and the United Nations. The
Treaty on the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons was passed at the UN on July 7. I am so excited about this, and hope that the stigma it places on even the
possession of nuclear weapons will encourage the 9 nuclear states to part
with theirs soon. You can watch the December 10 ceremony
here. Our work is described starting
at 58:50. And there are great speeches by the head of the Nobel Committee,
Beatrice Fihn, and Setsuko Thurlow (all women), and John Legend’s
performance of “Redemption Song.”
Nuclear winter continues to be the most important thing I work on. As a result of a question I asked of an Open Philanthropy Project program officer, after I had given her some advice on a geoengineering grant, they gave us a $2,982,206 grant to work on nuclear winter for the next three years. The funding comes from Facebook billionaires Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna. I am working with Brian Toon at the University of Colorado and other colleagues there, at Rutgers, and at the University of Chicago. This is great, as we have been unable to get funding from the U.S. government for this work. Our kickoff meeting to design credible nuclear war scenarios in Boulder this summer included Dan Ellsberg, whose book The Doomsday Machine, just came out, and I highly recommend it. And on PBS Newshour, he clearly explained the threat of nuclear winter.
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.
Fortunate to keep in touch with many of my
Pi Phi sorority sisters, we organized a
50th
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.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.
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
Love,
Alan and Sherri