My TEDx talk on nuclear winter now has 21,500 views so far, I have 1584 followers on Twitter, and now have 10 Huffington Post blogs.  But Brian Toon gave a TEDx talk on nuclear winter in November 2017, which was posted early this year, and he already has 1,661,870 views.  (There was something about "my button's bigger than yours" happening at the time, which made people more scared, rightly so.)  Let’s see if social media can really change the world.

    Things continue to go well at Rutgers.   They featured me and three colleagues in the Rutgers alumni magazine in November, which felt great, although we are only a few of the people here working on climate change.  They told us not to smile, so we looked concerned about Earth, but I wish I had smiled more.  The section about me is quite well written.

    I am on sabbatical this academic year, and since I normally don't teach in the Spring, I taught no formal courses this year.  I spent the Fall in New Orleans, as a Visiting Professor at Tulane University, so we could spend time with the grandkids.  In the spring and early summer next year I hope to spend time at the Univ. of Colorado working on volcanic eruptions.

    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.  My former student Brian Zambri worked with me as a postdoc for half a year, and now is working at MIT as postdoc with Susan Solomon. Lili Xia continues to work with me as a Research Associate at Rutgers on geoengineering nuclear winter.  And I have two  graduate students, Joshua Coupe and Hainan Zhang, working with me on the nuclear winter grant.  Altogether in 2018, I published 10 refereed journal articles 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 success so far, because there has been no nuclear war.  But there are a lot of things that have been screwed up, particularly on the environmental front.  However, we can now celebrate the blue wave.  And in New Jersey we went from 5 Republican House members in 2016 to only 1 now (unfortunately ours from the Positively Fourth District).

     We took lots of great trips again this year, particularly one to the south of Spain, Gibraltar, and Tenerife in March, and to Kyoto in September.  In January we went to NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana) to visit the grandkids, and then I went to the American Meteorological Society meeting in Austin and then to a meeting on volcanoes at the Tree Ring Lab in Tucson.  Outside of Tucson, I got to visit an old Titan II nuclear missile base that is now a museum.  The Tucson base had 18 liquid fueled rockets, each with a 9 Mt (!) warhead, the most powerful nuclear missile the U.S. ever had.  They made you watch a propaganda film first, claiming that these missiles kept the peace as a deterrent to attacks.  The tour was led by former soldiers who had actually sat at the console ready to push the button.  They even let us sit there, underground, and then we got to see one of the missiles up close.  It was very spooky.  I tried to explain to them that if we had ever used the missiles it would have been as suicide bombers, as we would have died from nuclear winter, but they were not interested.

    In February I attended a two day celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of both Jule Charney and Edward Lorenz at MIT.  They were both towering figures in the history of meteorology and climate.  Ed Lorenz was my Ph.D. advisor, and I was also inspired by Charney (and received the Charney Award from AMS in 2015), who was also at MIT as a professor.  His door had anti-Vietnam War stickers, which taught me that professors can teach ethics as well as science.  Lorenz advised me to get into climate for my dissertation in 1974, and I have been working in that field ever since.  It was great to see many old friends.  Here I am with fellow Lorenz students and sneaking into a photo with former Charney students, and to learn more about these great men.  Here are one slide about Charney and one about Lorenz, another slide about Lorenz, and a picture of the computer that he was using when he discovered chaos.  It was so cold on the trip that the Charles was frozen.  Here are a view from my hotel across the river with the Green Building (with the radar dome, building 54, in MIT parlance) where the Meteorology Department (now EAPS) is and the Citgo sign near Fenway Park in the distance, and a view up the campus with Tang Hall (octagonal) in the distance, where I lived for two years.  I was reminded of a party in Lorenz's basement the night I passed my Ph.D. defense, and when I received my Ph.D. diploma with Dave Salstein and John Roads, all three of us Lorenz's students, and a trip I took the next year (1978) to the Soviet Union with a very distinguished group of scientists.  Here is a group of us in Georgia, from left to right in the front row, Vladimir Aleksandrov, Jane, Ed, Jerry North, Bob Cess, Mike Wallace, unknown woman, Roland Madden (of MJO fame), and Aggie Madden, (behind Bob Chervin in the beard, white shirt, and blue jacket), and here are Jane Lorenz and me in Moscow - I still wear my Bolivian llama wool hat.  MIT also made a wonderful 15-minute movie about them, which you can watch on YouTube and would be great for teaching.  And I learned about a great iPhone app, My Attractor, which draws Lorenz's strange attractor butterflies.

    In March we took a Road Scholar trip to the south of Spain.  We were based in Estepona, which had cute streets here and here, orange trees, and nice statues and seafront.  The guide was very good.  The trip included Córdoba, with its beautiful Mezquita (mosque), but then you saw signs that a Catholic church had been inserted, including an organ, after destroying the interior of the mosque.  And all roads lead to Santiago.  On the way back we saw the ubiquitous Che, along with a risque claim.   We visited a seafood processing plant at the coast, and were shown octopus, up close, and fish.  We cooked paella, and the finished product won first prize from the judges at the restaurant.  It was good.  But the classic Spanish guitar music sounded like it looked.   We visited Ronda, perched over the El Tajo gorge, has the oldest bullring in Spain, and then visited a winery, with solar panels in the distance.  The hotel in Estepona was OK and did not have much of a beach, but on clear days from Estepona you could see Gibraltar.  You have to drive there, and drive or walk across the runway to get in.  It is British inside, but they do not make you drive on the left.  From the southern tip you can see Africa across the Straits of Gibraltar.  There is a limestone cave inside the "Rock," with seating for concerts and nice stalactites, and there are monkeys on the outside.  The Rock is also full of tunnels used during World War II to guard the Mediterranean, but there ended up being no fighting there.  From one lookout you can see the runway, and from below you can see the western side, still used by the military.  It's not hard to find the way back to Spain.

    We then spend a day in Málaga, where we saw a great Picasso Museum (he was born there), ate calamares and dessert, and a demonstration for higher wages, and then flew to Tenerife to attend a Chapman Conference on volcanoes I helped organize.  The hotel where we stayed was very luxurious, and the field trip took us to the top of the Teide volcano, the highest point in Spain.  We took a bus and then a cable car, almost to the top.  We and Juan Carlos hiked around and looked at the spectacular view over the old crater was  and we could see the Izaña Observatory on the old crater rim.  Then we went to Izaña, where we learned that Darwin had published a paper on Saharan dust, saw the CO₂ in the atmosphere at its highest value to date, almost 410 ppm, and saw them calibrating sun photometers for observatories around the world.  From the observatory we could see the low clouds and Tiede, and here we are with our fellow travelers. The conference group had a great conference dinner with volcanic dessert.  We walked around the town of Puerto de la Cruz with Brian Toon and Maggie Tolbert, and saw place where they were measuring growing cracks in the ground.  Agatha Christie had been a distinguished visitor.  One evening we watched hang gliders land into the sunset.

    In April I spend several days in Boulder as the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Distinguished Lecturer, at the University of Colorado during which I made plans to return next year on a CIRES Sabbatical Fellowship, if they will have me.  I then went to Vienna for a week at the EGU Meeting, followed by several days in Zurich at ETH (with its own little funicular) at our annual GeoMIP meeting.  While there we took a boat ride on the lake, took a train to the top of a hill overlooking the lake and city, with interesting light poles, and attended the annual parade and snowman burning to mark the end of winter.  As the smoke rises, at the end his head explodes.

    In May we stopped in Paris for a week, as I was on my way to a meeting in Bern.  We ate at a favorite restaurant, Les Fêtes Galantes.  It was the 50th anniversary of the 1968 street riots, and there was even an exhibition about it.  Our friend Constance Konold invited us to meet her in Amiens to take a boat ride in the hortillonnages (floating market gardens).  Jules Verne lived there for many years, and although we did not have time to see his house, I started reading all his books, which are very interesting for all the science in them, most of it correct.  Some of the metro stations in Paris were decorated with temperature change equations - what a civilized place.  We saw a bunch of old Citroens at the Eiffel Tower, still impressive, and covered with names of important French scientists.  We went to Luxembourg Gardens, where kids sail little boats, even an American one.  And, of course we had tarte tatin.  While there we attended an amazing sound and light show of Gustav Klimt at the Atelier des Lumières.  It is the biggest of its kind in the world, with 140 fixed video projectors and 50 speakers installed across the 3,300-square-meter (35,521-square-foot) former foundry, built in 1835.  We didn't know what it was when we went, and were looking forward to just seeing some Klimt, but were blown away.  Here are some photos of the projections onto the walls: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.   We visited our old neighborhood, only to see a demonstration against Macron, which went by the Paristanbul restaurant, still there.  Our apartment had a nice stairway and we ate at our favorite Spanish restaurant in the 5th.  At the end, Sherri left for home with a suitcase full of purchases, and I went on to Switzerland.

    In June, on the way to a conference in Honolulu, we stopped in Marin County to see Dan and friends.  Here are Dan at work and with the kids and Mr. Gandhi.  Vivi meditated and Dan was cute.  Dan and Vivi played at the Discovery Museum with grandkids of Sherri's friend Marilyn.  We had breakfast at Fred's and dinner with their former babysitter Marylou.  Then I went on to the AOGS conference where I had dinner with Kevin Hamilton.  As an invited speaker, I got to go on a dinner cruise with a rainbow and later fireworks over Honolulu, and a nice sunset.  Afterwards, I met the family in Kauai for a vacation.  At the hotel, we went fishing, and Vivi caught three fish.  Brian went surfing, the kids met a turtle on the beach, Sherri and I wore our old Hilo Hatties matching outfits from our honeymoon, and in a picture with the family, but the Hilo Hatties here only had one chair.  We also visited the blowhole and the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, with a waterfall and nice view down to the coast.  And I saw 2 Sherris there. At the top we looked down on the Napali Coast.  We went to a cave, but I got stuck.  Dan found a stick.  Dan and Vivi were on their iPads alone and with Grandpa.  I learned how to make Spam musubi, and was successful back home.

    During the first week in July I attended the International Conference on the Management of Energy, Climate and Air for a Sustainable Society at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, Cuba, organized by my friend Bob Bornstein, me, and others.  There were scientists from Cuba, Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. attending.  Due to my status as a Distinguished Visitor to the hotel, I got a nice room with a view over the ocean (note the lack of pleasure craft - Key West is not very far away), access to the V.I.P. lounge, a bottle of rum, and a bag of chocolates.  They have replaced the old photos in the hall of fame by the bar of distinguished guests with new ones, but I am still there.  While looking at it, the assistant manager told me, "You know, we have another picture of you in the hotel, too."  She took me to a special room that honors Fidel and has photos of important people he met.  On one panel, there are pictures of him with Jimmy Carter, Gerard Depardieu, Dan Rather, Muhammad Ali, Harry Belafonte, Steven Spielberg, Diego Maradona, Compay Segundo, Robert Redford, and Kevin Costner, among others.  But the biggest one is of Fidel and me!  Of course, there were beautiful old American cars.  I went with Bob, his wife Sureyya, and her sister Julia on a tour of the city in a '54 Cadillac, which I even got to drive.  It is very nice sitting and having a drink in the patio outside the hotel, or looking at the peacock.  We worked hard organizing the meeting, but had to take a break to watch the World Cup during the meeting.  I had a Cubano one day on the hotel veranda, and another night we had lobster and mojitos at a private rooftop restaurant nearby.  Another night we had lobster and beer.  There were beautiful sunsets.  People hang out along the Malecon.  One night we came back in a '49 Chevy (with a Hyundai diesel engine), and there were other nice old American cars, yellow, green, red, and blue/white.  There were four of us there from Rutgers, and here I am with Celso Pazos Alberdi, the new director of the Institute of Meteorology (the Cuban Weather Bureau), between me and Bob.  Unfortunately, although I also met with professors from the University of Havana, I did not see a path forward for future collaboration, except for my continuing work with Juan Carlos Antuña from Camagüey (see below about my visit there in October).
   
    We spent the rest of July and August at home, where we entertained our grandkids for two weeks and Madoka Sato from Japan.  See Sherri's description and pictures below.

    In September we drove to Maine, where we visited Jerry and Stephie, spent a day on Monhegan Island, and visited Colby College, where I gave a couple lectures.  Jerry and Stephie have a great house close to the ocean, and they took us for lobster rolls for lunch.  I had been to Monhegan 40 years ago with my mother, and it has not changed much.  The trip out there had good weather, and we could clearly see Monhegan on the horizon.  There were beautiful views over the town and up and down the cliffs on the eastern side.  Seagull at sunset.  It was foggy on the way back, but we got to see some seals.  I had lobster for three meals in a row, including the scrambled eggs with lobster at the hotel.

    Later in September we flew to Japan.  They take Halloween very seriously there, even a month before the holiday, such as at Krispy Kreme and in liquor ads.  We spent 4 days visiting Madoka and his family near Tokyo.  We had dinner with some friends.  One day Madoka drove us to see Mt. Fuji.  Here is our first view and a closer view, and an even closer view, and we ate at a nice noodle restaurant.  Another day we went to the Tokyo Museum, and although it was raining, there were still people painting models in the plaza out front, and Sherri honored Saigō Takamori.  Lunch was great.  We had a nice dinner at Madoka's house with his family.  We bought tickets on the 10 a.m. Shinkansen to Kyoto, where I attended the SPARC conference, opened with drums, but the night before Madoka called our hotel at midnight telling us trains had been cancelled starting at 9:30 am the next day due to the approaching Typhoon Trami.  My forecast had told me we would get to Kyoto before the typhoon, but the train had planned to go farther southwest to where the typhoon was approaching.  Fortunately, we were able to get onto an earlier train, but many arriving later that day to Tokyo airport got stuck there for a day and our conference ended up starting a little late.  In Kyoto we got automated warnings on my Apple watch and iPhones.  The typhoon was strong over Okinawa, but as it approached Kyoto the wind speed went down due to friction over the land and the eye dissipated, as you can see here, here, here, and here.  The lowest surface air pressure we saw was 970.9 mb, but there was not that much rain and wind.  We had a nice afternoon, including seeing sparrow snacks in the market and a local temple, although the metro and a lot of places were closed.  In Kyoto, we a shrine near the conference center, with a beautiful park, a clearly marked exit, and a Torii gate nearby.  One night we went to a local restaurant, full of noisy middle aged women drinking beer and having a good time.  One of them apologized to us for the noise.  We walked through the Gion district, where foreign tourists from other Asian nations rented kimonos to walk around in.  We then went to the Forever Museum of Contemporary Art, and saw an exhibit of the work of Yayoi Kusuma.  The pumpkins, pumpkin paintings, and Fuji were great, as were a mirror room and boat she designed.  Even the coffee shop served pumpkins.  Madoka and Emi came to Kyoto for 2 days and took us to the Byodo-in shrine, in Uji city, which is on the 10 yen coin.  The water was raging in the nearby river, swollen with rain from the typhoon.  On the way back to Kyoto, we stopped at the Fushimi Inari shrine, with spectacular orange gates, crowded, but each one has the name of its sponsor on it.  We also went to a shrine full of buddhas (no photos) which was the largest wooden building in Japan, and to the tallest pagoda in Japan.  That night we ate at a hole-in-the wall restaurant Madoka knew, with beautiful, and tasty, sashimi.  We met a Swedish woman there, touring Japan alone, who showed us pictures of her dressing up in a kimono.  Sherri went to a shrine where people who have broken up a relationship write a wish on a piece of paper and then crawl through the gate, hoping for better luck in the future.  We took the Shinkansen back to Tokyo, past the Kirin brewery, but Fuji was cloud-covered.  The best view was from Madoka on his way to Kyoto.  You can see the crater on the side from its most recent eruption, which annoys Japanese by ruining the symmetry.

    In early October I went to the annual UCAR meeting in Boulder, and then we left for NOLA for the rest of the year.  I have a desk at Tulane, courtesy of Prof. Cindy Ebinger, and helped teach one of her classes.  I'll be giving a seminar at Tulane in January as well as a talk at LSU in Baton Rouge.

    My second trip to Cuba was to Camagüey in October, to a workshop organized by Juan Carlos to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his research station.  Here are Juan Carlos and his family, and with Juan Carlitos and the two instruments I helped send to him, a GPS and a pyranometer, the old lidar, still not working, a discussion ("No matter who falls, no matter who dies, the revolution will not disappear."), the group at the meeting, Terry Deshler and Errico Armondillo who dined with me on a rooftop as a thunderstorm approached, and citizens exercising in the main square in the morning.  Here are a beautiful square, a bus, another bus, and a ceremony with the ubiquitous Che.

    The next week I went to Puerto Vallarta, to give an invited talk at the annual meeting of the Mexican Geophysical Union.  There were a nice fruit basket and bottle of champagne waiting for me at the hotel.  Here are part of my audience and cruise ships sailed in and parked here.  Here's how they do Halloween.

     In November Sherri and I went to San Francisco to see Joan Baez with our friends Bob and Sureyya, Gene and Ellen Sherman, and Ian and Norma Gilson.  Unfortunately we arrived at the same time as the worst air pollution on the planet, due to the Camp Fire to the north.   Compared to what the people in Paradise, California suffered, we were fine, but the smoke ruined our plans for visiting Sausalito and hiking, and we all left early.  However, we took advantage of the De Young Museum, where we saw a great Gaugin show.  I bet you recognize this as a Gaugin.  But what about this?  Here is the view of Mt. Sutro from the museum.  We had a great dinner before the concert.  And Joan's concert was wonderful.  She waved to us at the end, and she and her son Gabe on percussion and the rest of the team took a knee at the end, in the same city as Colin Kapernick did.  Before we left we had a nice dinner with Brian and Dan at a favorite Chinese restaurant in Sausalito.

     My last trip of the year was to Utrecht University to give invited talks on nuclear winter, geoengineering, and volcanoes, and then to Washington for the Fall AGU Meeting.  In Utrecht, I climbed the Dom Tower (the bell clappers were eaten apples), with views of the city, and my host, Claudia Wieners took me on a trip on the weekend to see dykes and windmills.  Here are the old ones, now a tourist attraction, but there were many more of the new ones.  She wanted it to be an 80 km bike ride, but I was not up for that, so I rented a car.  The trip was even more pleasurable because I went shopping at the Culture Boat.  Here are the inside, the price list and my purchase.

    In DC, I went to the National Portrait Gallery, with the famous paintings of Michelle and Barack Obama, as well as, among many other interesting works, Gilbert Stuart's George Washington, his incomplete one used as the picture on the $1 bill, a fatter George Washington by Rembrandt Peale, Katherine Hepburn and her actual 4 Academy Awards, e. e. cummings, Eugene V. Debs, Alexander Calder, Ernest Hemingway, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Japanese crossing the Delaware.

    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 $0.23 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 did not buy a Tesla Model 3, as it was not convenient, being in New Orleans for the end of the year, but I hope to buy one in 2019.

    We didn't see Bob Dylan this year, but did see Christine Lavin in February and Springsteen, on Broadway in March, alone and with Patti, saw photos from the Dylan archive in Asbury Park in April for the third year in a row, and enjoyed the annual Bobfest in Red Bank, on Bob’s birthday.  In August we saw the Beach Boys in the Ocean Grove auditorium with Madoka.  In September we saw Joan Baez for the first time in Red Bank.  They did the kneeling thing there, too, so we were not surprised when they did it in San Francisco.  We look forward to seeing her again in Princeton next April.

   We did not go to a Wisconsin football game this year, and although they started out well, they lost a lot of games.  One problem was that their starting quarterback got injured and missed several, games, but they ended up on a good note, defeating Miami in a bowl game (this time the Pinstripe Bowl) for the second year in a row.  The backup quarterback, Jack Coan, had a good game, and they have the best running back in the country, Jonathan Taylor, so I have hopes for a better season next year.

Sherri:  2018 was busy with visits to grand kids and travel to fun places, which Al has aptly described.  I did less political protest stuff due to being away from NJ for much of the year, and, as Al is on sabbatical and we plan to do some travel in 2019, I will probably stay out of the loop for a while.  In the meantime I’ve become somewhat educated about Minecraft, learned to release the drone from my hair, and condone their imaginative play, which leads to living room destruction from time to time!  Vivi, now 6, is as avid an iPad fan as is Danny, now 8, and they both have strange conversations as they enter each other’s world and design stuff that isn’t exactly non-violent. On the other hand, we made Christmas decorations from recycled materials, decorating one of the wreaths with the Gandhi doll that I used to use in my class to amuse my college students.  Vivi took Mr. Gandhi to school, along with a kid’s book about him, and we use him to counter the Minecraft and Nerf Gun Wars that take place on a too regular a basis.