PEACE IN THE NEW YEAR
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December 30, 2019 |
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Telephone: (732) 881-1610 (cell Alan), (732) 881-1609 (cell Sher) |
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Alan: The Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons now has 80 signatories,
with 34 ratifications. The treaty comes into force with 50
ratifications. I am still 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.
Nuclear winter continues to be the most important thing I work on. We are making progress on our Open Philanthropy Project, and our team gave 10 presentations on the work at the recent Fall AGU Meeting in December. We published a number of papers, including in major journals Science and Science Advances, and have one about to come out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Our Open Philanthropy grant ends next year, but we have proposed to them to continue to support us, based on our productivity and the importance of the work, and we are waiting to hear from them.
My TEDx
talk on nuclear winter now has 27,800 views so far, I
have 2000 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 over 3,000,000
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.
I was really excited
to pick up my new Tesla Model 3 at the end of January. It
already has 14,247 miles on it, including a trip to Colorado for
the summer and back. The only service I have done is to
rotate the tires and fill up the windshield washer fluid.
It is so much fun to drive, and powering it with my solar
panels, it makes me feel like I am doing a small part to address
global warming. Of course, my research is also
helping. It's the only car I have ever had that gets
better with time, with regular over-the-air updates that make it
faster, brake better, and drive automatically better, as well as
updated entertainment options. Here is a shot of the screen when I reached 10,000
miles. At home it charges at 42 miles of range per
hour (max range is 310 miles), but at a supercharger it can
charge at more than 600 miles per hour.
I highly recommend you buy one, and when you do use my code
https://ts.la/alan20766
for 1,000 miles of free supercharging.
Things continue to go well at Rutgers. My sabbatical ended in the summer, and I just finished teaching two courses in the Fall to undergraduate Meteorology majors. I taught one course on Climate Dynamics, and here is the Halloween costume of one of my students, Ashley Cornish, who really learned the lesson on chaos, with Lorenz's equations on her shirt and butterfly wings on her back and head. I'll have next semester free from teaching to focus on research, with some travel thrown in. I still love my job. I turned 70 in September (how did I get so old so fast?), but have no plans to retire.
I am working on my National Science Foundation (NSF) grant
to study geoengineering, and am in the process of submitting
a renewal. My NSF grant to study volcanic eruptions
has ended but I have not lost interest in them.
Lili Xia continues to work with me as a Research
Associate at Rutgers on geoengineering and nuclear winter.
And I have two graduate students, Joshua Coupe and
Hainan Zhang, working with me on the nuclear winter
grant. Altogether in 2019, I published 9
refereed journal articles and 4 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
although the Trump administration has not started a nuclear war,
I don't know where to start with what's wrong. I like Bernie
Sanders and Pete Buttigieg for President, but I'll vote for
whomever the Dems nominate. And I can hope that the
blue wave from last year continues in the election this
Fall.
We took lots of great trips again this year. We spent
January in New Orleans, continuing my sabbatical visit to
Tulane. On January 20 we saw a
lunar eclipse, and it turned red
after it was completely in Earth's shadow. Danny and Sherri helped with the
observations. We drove across the Lake Ponchatrain causeway to visit LSU
in Baton Rouge. I gave a talk at the inaugural meeting of CLAMS, the Coastal
Louisiana American Meteorological Society chapter.
We were hosted by Robert Rohli, who took us to the state capitol building, where Huey Long was murdered,
and we could see down the Mississippi
River. On another trip we took the Huey Long Bridge across the
Mississippi near New Orleans to drive on the Route 1 causeway to Grand Isle on the
Gulf Coast. You could see oil rigs
out from the oily beach, and it was
not very grand. But they clearly are adapting to sea level rise. We
saw the Lake Ponchatrain causeway again on
our flight back to New Jersey.
I went to Arizona in
February for a geoengineering meeting at Arizona
State in Tempe, and then to visit the University of
Arizona in Tucson, where I gave a talk and got a personal tour
of Biosphere II by Dean Joaquin
Ruiz, whom I had met in Puerto Vallarta the previous Fall, which
was very gracious of him. It has an ocean, a desert,
and a rain forest, and looks very futuristic even today. He
even pointed out Noam Chomsky
walking across the street as we returned to Tucson.
In March I went to a
climate conference at a ski resort in the Alps, Reideralp.
It has the longest glacier in the Alps.
The view from my room was spectacular, as was the view from lunch. There had just been a
huge snowfall, but it was sunny while we were there for gondola rides and hikes. You could see the Matterhorn, and we hiked back down a ski run from the top
of the local mountain after a fondue
conference dinner.
I then went to Stockholm at
the invitation of their local Pugwash group to give a talk about
nuclear winter, but was not able to convince Sweden to sign the
TPNW, as they erroneously think that NATO's nuclear weapons will
somehow protect them from Russia,
even though they are not a member. They have psychedelic metro escalators.
The Stockholm city hall has a nice view across the river, and is
where the annual Nobel banquet is given for most of the
awards. The parliament building
has a nice view back to the city hall.
Stockholm University has a bust of Svante
Arrhenius, father of global warming. I gave a talk
at the Swedish weather service on
geoengineering, where they understand the
real solutions to global warming.
In April we took an
amazing trip to Cambridge, UK, for a volcano conference, to
Paris for fun, and then to Valladolid, Spain, where I gave
invited talks on geoengineering, volcanic eruptions, and nuclear
winter. We stayed at the Gonville
Hotel, which has two old Bentleys.
They picked us up at the train station
and took us on a free tour of Cambridge.
We visited Anja Schmidt and Kay, and
their daughter Lexi, who greeted us
with an analog sign. The view
of the market and university from a church steeple was
beautiful, and we walked across the Mathematical
Bridge to Queen's College for a vegetarian
conference banquet in a beautiful
dining hall. Sherri enjoyed the Revolution
restaurant, with two of her favorite revolutionaries.
Unfortunately, we arrived
in Paris the day after Notre Dame burned.
There were still fire hoses in the
streets of Ile St. Louis where we stayed, and broadcasters lined
up. Still we managed to enjoy ourselves, with Sherri
eating Bertillon and window shopping while Notre Dame still smoldered. As
it was the 50th anniversary of our
landing on the moon, we went to an exhibition
with original photos, and another
here, where Sherri and I stepped in a copy of the famous moon
footprint, and admired moon art here,
here, and here,
and saw Galileo's original telescope. We went with Lisa and Steve to a play about the invention of the Eiffel
Tower. We also took them to the Ateliers des
Lumieres for a sound and light show
about Van Gogh, with additional Japanese art, took them to Pere
Lachaise to see Jim Morrison's grave,
and walked back through the Jardin des
Plantes with them. At the Fondation Louis Vuitton,
we saw amazing indoor art here and here, strange
outdoor art, and got to go into an
infinity room by
Yayoi Kusuma, whom we discovered on a trip to
Japan last year. We and the police
were there for the Yellow Vest
demonstrations.
Next we went to Valladolid,
Spain, where I visited the University of
Valladolid and gave three invited
talks, the last one in Spanish (but reading from my
iPad). I even appeared on the
local TV show with my host Ángel
M. de Frutos Baraja, discussing my work in Spanish.
The town square had the city hall. We visited the local church where we took a tour of the tower, with a nice view of another church and Jesus with a big heart. Juan Carlos Antuña was there with his son
(who is a grad student at the university), wife,
father-in-law, daughter-in law, and granddaughter, and Ángel
and Victoria. The university
library has some amazing rare
books. They like to eat meat,
and at the Patagonia restaurant,
they also had purple cotton candy with
the cheese appetizer. At one
of the bars, they won a prize
for a tapas called "Obama in the White House."
We drove to Boulder for
May, June, and July in the Tesla. The
car planned its own route. There was always room at the superchargers, and it even drove itself. It took 3
days each way, and was much easier than we had imagined.
The grandkids visited us for a total of five weeks, and we had a
lot of fun with them. I worked at the Univ. of Colorado
and NCAR, and got a lot of work
done. But the grandkids were more photogenic. I
showed them the old Cray computer at
NCAR, once the fastest in the world, and we had lunch at the cafeteria and took a picture outside. Danny threatened me with a snowball on the
way up the path. Here's a
nice photo from a hike out behind NCAR. We took them
to a cave park, a gold mine, to see dinosaur tracks, to the Boulder Fair bubbles and bouncy house, to the Denver Science Museum, and into the
Rockies for a snowball fight.
Danny recycled Kleenex boxes.
Here's a picture of all of us when Dan
was visiting. We took them to the planetarium on the 50th anniversary of the
moon landing. I was able to see my former Maryland
department chair Ferd Baer, former
postdoc Gonzalo Miguez Macho, and
former classmate Howie Bluestein with
his wife Kathleen. Sherri and I went to Red Rocks for a July 4 concert. The sky was great. We drove to Gold
Hill one day, with my favorite road sign
of all time. We also drove to Aspen, where at the Continental Divide, small dots on the nearby hill turned
into skiers and snowboarders.
The beautiful art museum had not
much of interest inside, and even called a
burning oven, pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,
art. This was Lebron James' house.
A gondola ride to the top of the
mountain produced nice views.
At Maroon Bells, a rainstorm obscured the view, but did
not match a hailstorm in Boulder.
In June, I went to a climate engineering conference at the Academy of Sciences in Rio de Janeiro (Paulo Artaxo on the left was my host), and then visited the University of São Paulo. Rio was covered with graffiti. At the shore you could see Sugar Loaf behind the lovers and behind the scientist. And Corcovado was in the distance. The modern art museum included a piece of meat hanging and globes on turntables. And there was traditional art, too. We had dinner at Fogo de Chao, with as much meat on skewers as you wanted. (There is also one just next to the Moscone Center in San Fransisco, if you are so inclined.) We took off in the night from downtown Rio and as we approached gigantic, polluted São Paulo, we landed downtown amidst the buildings. Here are the view from my hotel room and from Paulo's apartment. The Uber drive to the São Paulo airport to leave was so slow that vendors stood on the expressway. The University of São Paulo is very impressive, and I reconnected with guaraná, now available as diet guaraná from Amazon.
In August, I spent a week in Beijing leading our ninth annual GeoMIP Workshop at Beijing Normal University. Here I am with Confucius. A group of scientists from our DECIMALS project, after discussions, also posed there. I was treated to Peking duck by my friend and co-editor, Yun Duan, and we also ordered on our own, which seemed to work. The air was amazingly clean, with blue skies, quite different from my previous trip. I took a walk around Houhai Lake and Xihai Sea, which featured beautiful vegetation, flowers, statues, tourists taking pictures of ducks, donkey burgers (I did not partake), boating, more blue skies, old men with their birds, and even swimmers. In early October I went to
the annual UCAR meeting in Boulder for two days. The best
part was a talk by Sen. Sheldon
Whitehouse, who is very impressive on climate change, and
should be in the White House himself. Then we went to a Wisconsin football game
in October with my college roommates Gene (and his wife Ellen) and Ian
(and his wife Norma), and they crushed Michigan State. A statue of Bucky Badger greeted
us at the hotel, and we greeted
him back, but then he
greeted Sherri in person. We visited the state capitol building.
It is beautiful inside,
although controlled by Republicans. We took a nice photo from the roof.
First the pep rally. At the game, parachutists arrived, Wisconsin scored, and Barry Alvarez walked by.
We relived our
revolutionary past, including visiting our apartment on Mifflin Street, home of the first block party and police
riot 50 years ago when we lived there.
In November we went into New York City to see Dylan (see
below), but also went to the new MOMA, saw the Vessel, a Minecraft dandelion cow, and
went to a play, The Sound Inside, with Mary Louise
Parker (it was not very good - depressing and not very
interesting). We saw great art at MOMA, here, here,
here, here, here,
here, and this one, by Yayoi
Kusuma.
My last work trip of the
year was to San Francisco for the Fall AGU Meeting. We saw
the lights in Union Square, and
watched Wisconsin lose to Ohio State
in the Big Ten Championships, but still make it to the Rose
Bowl. At our nuclear winter poster session, we got a
picture of Turco, Toon, Ackerman,
Robock, and Stenchikov, nuclear winter pioneers, and Brian
Toon and I are still working on the problem. At I dinner with
Lili, I wore glasses made with pipe cleaners
for her son. At the
Atmospheric Sciences Section dinner, we got a picture of past,
present, and future section Presidents, Rich
Turco, Joyce Penner, Jim Hurrell, Paul Newman, Bill Lau, me,
and Warren Wiscombe. At one of the sessions this guy with little hair was sitting
behind Brian Toon, and then appeared
on stage with Michael Bloomberg.
Brown was much more personable, but
both agreed on the issues, particularly dealing with global
warming.
Our solar panels (photovoltaic, shown here
with our electric car and hybrid) 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. I have updated the figure this year to explicitly
take account of the SRECs and annual settling of the bill by
the electric company. All negative values are payments
to us. Since we earn about $2000 per year, plus get
about $2000 worth of electricity, the solar panels make an
annual $4000 profit.
Not only have we not paid an electric bill in years, but we
emit no CO2 for our
electricity generation. I know all my flying cancels
this out, and we do use natural gas for heating and cooking,
and buy products, mostly food, with carbon footprints, but at
least I feel good about being green with the Tesla and
electricity. I will start paying carbon offsets for my
emissions as soon as I can be sure I have found one that is
legitimate. And I am working with Rutgers, the National
Center for Atmospheric Research, and the American Geophysical
Union to pay carbon offsets for all travel, like the European
Geosciences Union now does. But as I say in my global
warming talks, "it is more important to change your leaders
that to change your lightbulbs," so I will pay even more in
political donations than carbon offsets to address the global
warming problem.
We saw Bob Dylan this
year, me for the 48th time and Sherri for the 24th, with Lisa and Steve, the first
time for them. He has a great
band and it was in the
beautiful Beacon Theater with
nice statues in New York, but he just croaked out the
words, and his singing was not very enjoyable.
However, we did enjoy the Dylan
Archives presentation for the four year in a row in
Asbury Park. But we also saw many of my other
favorites, including Peter
Yarrow in April, who even let
Sherri sing with him, Joan Baez
in Princeton in May, Robert Cray
at Chautauqua in Boulder in July, and Arlo Guthrie in Asbury Park in
September (great as usual). We saw Christine Lavin
in November, but she was with 4 other people, so we
did not get enough of her. But we did enjoy one
of her partners, John Gorka.
Sherri even talked me into going to
see Johnny Mathis with her in
March in New Brunswick (talented, but not my cup of tea),
and Steely Dan in Asbury Park in October, who were really
terrible - much too loud with horrible music.
Although Wisconsin lost to Illinois in a
fluke, and to Ohio State twice legitimately, they are
still going to the Rose Bowl on January 1, which I will
watch with pleasure with Gene at his home in Palos Verdes
Estates. Since we have both gone before (I went 25
years ago), we decided it would be a lot less hassle to
just watch on TV rather than attend. And it may be
our last chance to watch the best running back in the
country, Jonathan Taylor, before he turns pro.
And one
final thought, which gives me hope. There is this, and there is this.
Sherri: And, following on Al’s last sentence,
a comment on the state of the world,
along with my hope for the world. Why? Because they’re smart, resilient, curious, and
imaginative, and we need their help if we’re going to combat some of the problems that face us. I’m planning on stepping up a bit in 2020,
having taken much of 2019 off, as you can see from Al’s comments and pictures above. “Speak the Ruth” and “March for Truth and Justice”
will be my cause, and will work actively in the upcoming elections.
I enjoyed being with the kids in New Orleans, where we stayed until the end of January, and then when they visited in Boulder where we took full
advantage of the wonderful library and community center activities.
Vivi, now 7 and in the
first grade, is an excellent reader, and likes science, especially natural things like earthquakes or historical things, like the sinking of the Titanic. In fact, I gave
her “Escape This Book - the Titanic” and
Danny, not a big fan of reading, wanted to participate as well and even asked me to get him a book and another on Egypt that is being published! A win for Grandma and books,
as opposed to various screens, which still seem to
capture their attention way too much.
Danny, now 9, is still crazy about Pokemon and Bey Blades, which he makes along with
competing with Grandpa in
stadiums with the ones he's given or made. And this past summer, he enjoyed
playing Nerf guns in the lawn at our apartment with his Grandpa. And they do play nicely together,
which they recently did at Encinitas Beach, where Al’s sister, Lisa, and her husband Steve, live. While tiring, it’s so much fun to be with the grand kids because I can act their age, and,
aside from a few stares from people nearby, can get away with it!
Brian now works for a new video game company in California, but can work remotely much of the time, but also gets a chance
to visit and stay with his brother in San Rafael, as well as
surf. Dan continues to enjoy sports,
though disappointed at his teams, especially the Giants, and is good with his deli job at Nuggets. As I write this letter,
having just returned from a lovely trip to Southern California, where we had a
family dinner at Lisa’s and at Al’s friends
Gene and Ellen, I’m glad to have been able to spend some time with both boys, who have sworn off New Jersey visits, except in the spring or summer.
I had a good year, still volunteer at Meals and participate in Dining for Women with friends,
and have seen some former students and colleagues. In Boulder, when the kids weren’t there, I enjoyed the Current
Events discussions at the library, where I met and lunched with some nice people, attended the annual Shakespeare
Festival at Colorado, where I attempted a theatrical pose and we saw “As You Like It,” (which we didn’t care
for so much), and we lunched at a park near our home with the grandkids and
Shirley Purcell
But one of my priorities, as I mentioned at the beginning of my letter, is to bring civility back to this country, so will campaign for the Democrats and try to get more people out to vote. Please join me in this effort, and we’ll all have something to celebrate as 2021 dawns, or, more specifically, on Tuesday, November 3rd!
May your 2020 be a healthy and fulfilling one. Happy New Year.
Love,
Alan and Sherri