The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons now has 65 ratifications, and while it makes the worst weapons of mass destruction illegal, the nine nuclear states continue to ignore it.  The U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, which came out recently, continues the claim that we need to keep the weapons for deterence, and the U.S. just increased the Defense Dept. budget again.  The Non-Proliferation Treaty has review conferences every five year.  The latest, delayed by Covid for two years, was held at the United Nations in August.  I went and made a presentation about our global famine results next to Ambassador Alexander Kmentt from Austria, who was instrumental in getting the Treaty enacted, but the nuclear nations continue to ignore us.  As a step to further our cause, Brian Toon and I have just written a book, Dead Dinosaurs and Nuclear Winter, pointing out that we can prevent the same fate for humanity that met the dinosaurs.  We just finished writing it and it is out for review from a publisher.  I hope it gets published and wide dissemination next year, and that you'll see us with Stephen Colbert on a book tour talking about it.   

    Sherri and I are lucky.  I have a job I love and can work from home much of the time, although I taught two courses at Rutgers in person this past Fall.  All the students were required to be vaccinated.  We all had to wear masks for the first month, but then were able to take them off.  It was much better and I got to know the students and interact with them in a much deeper way.

    Nuclear winter continues to be the most important thing I work on.  Supported by our Open Philanthropy Project grant we published three more journal articles.  The Nature Food article got a lot of attention (picked up by 195 news outlets, and see above), and the one on a new ocean state was also well received (picked up by 111 news outlets).  Our Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, initiated at Princeton two year ago, is now hosted by the Arms Control Association.  So far the coalition has more than 800 members, and I have given 12 of the more than 100 presentations they have arranged.   This past year I gave five talks about nuclear winter at conferences, and another 18 invited talks, some of which are now in person.

    We may have prevented a global nuclear war, so far, but the international and domestic political situations still leave much to be desired.  My heart breaks for the people of Ukraine, and for the people of Russia.  And it is not hard to think of many other places where the government is failing its citizens.  Here at home, the November elections ended up much better than was predicted, and the Jan. 6 Committee did a great job establishing the historic record of what happened.  And it turns out most of my fellow citizens still are in favor of democracy and the truth.  The Biden Administration had many successes, including the best legislation so far on dealing with global warming.  It's not nearly enough yet, but the price of solar and wind power keeps going down.  However, don't get me started on guns, abortion, and racism.

    At the Future of Life celebration, we stayed right next to the Brooklyn Bridge.  When David McCullough died recently, and I was looking for a book to read, I read his book on The Great Bridge, which was so fascinating.  I had no idea what an engineering triumph it was.  Since then, I have also read his books on The Wright Brothers and The Pioneers (the history of Ohio), and am now in the middle of John Adams.  When told well, these are great stories and deepen my appreciation for our country's history.

    Things continue to go well at Rutgers.  Along with Lili Xia, supported by two NSF grants, one from the Open Philanthropy Project, and one from SilverLining, we have a group of three postdocs and three graduate students.  Of the postdocs, Josh Coupe is has taken another position at the Univ. of Colorado in Boulder, and has written three brilliant papers, all showing how non-linear responses to global cooling after nuclear war have caused certain parts of the atmosphere and ocean to actually warm.  The last one, about less sea ice around Antarctica, has just been accepted for publication and you can see the others at http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/#Publications.  At the same time he has also worked for Cheryl Harrison studying the ocean after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs.  You can read about the rest of our team at https://sites.rutgers.edu/risci-lab/people/.  In the summer Lili and I took Nina, Brendan and Mim to the Manasquan beach.

     Altogether in 2022, I published 7 refereed journal articles and 5 other articles, with one more in press, and have another three articles in review, all of which I expect to be published soon.  It has been another productive year.  If you are interested in more information or want to read any of my articles, visit my home page and click on My Publications.  My h-index is now 102.

   In addition to the trips mentioned above, we were able to begin a little more travel this year.  On Christmas day last year, we flew to San Diego to visit my sister Lisa and Brian and the grandkids, all of whom now live in Carlsbad, and our friends the Shermans in Los Angeles and our son Dan in San Francisco. We had not seen Lisa, the Shermans or Dan in person for two years.  Lisa and Steve have a great new house with a hot tub in the back.  One of their neighbors even ordered snow for the winter.  We went to the beach with Brian and the kids, where Danny worked hard to bury Vivi.  We even brought a couple paintings Brian had done at our house in NJ to his new pad to help decorate.  Gene made bratwursts for us to eat as we watched the Badgers win a bowl game on Dec. 30.  We also went for a nice walk with Gene and Ellen on their beach.  Dan picked us up and drove us across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito.  We took the ferry back to the city one day, where we met Bob and Sureyya behind the Ferry Building next to Gandhi and with a nice view of the Bay Bridge.  The ride back had a nice sunset over Alcatraz.  One night we had dinner at a favorite Chinese restaurant in Sausalito with Danny and Vivi's old nanny, Lulu and her niece, as well as Dan and his friend Justin.  Another day we hiked to Tennessee Beach with Dan.

   We celebrated Lili's 40th birthday with her and her husband Xi, and at the end of January were greated with a half meter of snow which filled our deck.  I tried to eat an icicle, and we saved some for Danny and Vivi to play with when they visited us later in the summer.  We took some hikes at a national wildlife refuge and Cattus Island County Park.  We visited a place I always wanted to see, the Horn Antenna on top of the highest hill in our county, which was used by Penzias and Wilson to measure the 3 K background radiation of the universe, the remnants of the Big Bang, and earn a Nobel Prize in Physics.  They worked nearby at Bell Labs, which has now been repurposed as a shopping center and office building.

   In April we went to New Orleans to visit Brian and the grandkids.  We ate at Brigtsen's where Sherri enjoyed pecan pie.  Vivi and Danny made Easter eggs.  We played soccer with the kids.  Vivi and Danny played with giant soap bubbles.  Vivi made a special sandwich with 10 different ingredients, ate it, and enjoyed it.  We took them to the sculpture garden at City Park, with multiple mirrors, lots of butts, moss-covered trees, and of course finishing with beignets.  In May my student Mahjabeen (Mim) Rahman and her husband Rub brought us a feast to help them celebrate Eid Al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. 

     At the end of June just before we went to Greenland I attended a Gordon Research Conference on Climate Intervention (geoengineering) in Maine.  Unfortunately, because of their timing, I missed most of the visit by Dan, Danny and Vivi here.  But I was here for Brian's friend Mikey to visit and have lobster, Dan to enjoy the best pizza in the U.S., and to make ikura with Vivi and Spam musubi with Danny and Vivi.  We went to the beach and took a picture in front of our house.  It was Brian's birthday, and we surprised him with a cake.  Vivi made a sculpture from left over artichoke leaves.

   I drove Lili to Maine, and we stopped to visit Jerry and Stephie on the way.  In Maine we visited a covered bridge, and my group went out to eat lobster rolls at a nearby restaurant.  On the way home I spent another day with Jerry and Stephie, and we had dinner with cousins Lynn and Carl Schenker.

    On the way home from Greenland we stopped in Iceland for a day, and visited the tourist trap called the Blue Lagoon, which consists of dirty waste water from a geothermal generating plant that people like to lie in.  And they have funny condom displays.  And we visited the coastline with a lighthouse and keyboards.  My cousin Laura and her husband Bill visited us in August.

   In addition to teaching two classes this Fall, I was able to make two trips to conferences.  I went to NCAR in Boulder in October for a workshop on climate engineering.  It was great to be back there for the first time in three years, and to connect in person with many friends and colleagues.  I had dinner with old friend Bob Chervin, and saw the blue horse at Denver airport.  I hope my trips there at least once a year are now back on.  And I went to the Fall AGU Meeting in December, which was held in Chicago for the first time.  I don't know what AGU was thinking, but we lucked out as the terrible recent weather there waited until the meeting was over and everyone had gone home.  It was wonderful to see so many people in person (16,000 total attendance).  The Editor's dinner was at the Adler Planetarium, which afforded a great view of the Chicago skyline.  I gave two talks and served on one panel discussion.  I ran into Pasha Groisman and Ghassan Taha, and Carlos Nobre gave a spectacular talk about the Amazon and its future.  Our editorial team for my journal, Reviews of Geophysics, met in person, and I was reappointed Editor for another four years.  All of the research group I share with Lili were at the conference, three students and three postdocs, and it was a great experience for them.

   As I prepared for my trip to Chicago, I realized that one of my favorite podcasts, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, is recorded there on Thursdays at the Studebaker Theater, and sure enough, there was going to be a show the week of the AGU Meeting.  So I got tickets and went with my friend and fellow Rev. Geophys. Editor, Ann Marie Carlton, whom I knew was a fan of the show.  We saw the stars of the show, Peter Sagal and Bill Kurtis, and that week they had Adam Burke, Zainab Johnson, and Tom Papa as guests and Andrew Bird doing Not My Job. It was fun to see how they messed up several times, but the final edited product, which I listened to that weekend, was very smooth.

    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 $0.23 per kWh plus we get the electricity, worth another $0.14 per kWh.  The figure explicitly takes 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 from SRECs, 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, although not in 2020 or 2021, 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 can begin traveling again.  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 went to no concerts this year and no football games. But I am looking forward to reading Bob Dylan's new book early next year, with no more teaching to do.  And I'll watch the Badgers will play in the Guranteed Rate Bowl on December 27, when they meet Oklahoma State.  They have not been doing well lately, and fired their coach for the first time in decades.  Let's hope the new coach gets them back on track next year.

Sherri:   2022 has been okay, except for getting Covid after our trip to Greenland, but we were both mildly sick and took Paxlovid, so an easy recovery.  It also saw me going to grocery stores in person, one of my least favorite tasks, next to dusting!  I’ve visited the grandkids several times over the past year, just returning last week from a trip that featured us making gingerbread houses with Danny (now 12 years old—a tween!) and Vivi’s (now 10 years old-a double-digit!) cousins, Otto and Tillie.  And, believe it or not, there was still some of the cookie houses left the next day, though you can imagine how much was consumed in their construction.  Sugar highs resulted in a somewhat sleepless night for us all!  We went to the park with Brian, and they played at a party for friends, which included flying.  And we went to have Vivi Bubble Tea.

The kids are doing well in school, with both of them playing soccer in the fall, and Vivi now playing softball. At Halloween time, Danny carved a pumpkin and Vivi put on scary stickers.  But the thing they both like best is playing video games, Roblox being one of their favorites, and, regrettably, we never got around to their showing me one of the games they play.  When they asked me my favorite game, I told them that I’ve only played one game, Pong, and their eyes filled with disbelief and amazement, and they reminded me that I’ve also played Wii tennis and bowling.  How quickly I forget.  But they also play checkers and chess, spinners and slime—see the pics!  And here’s a pic from our most recent “adventure,” seeking shelter from the tornado that came close to us on my most recent trip, but, fortunately, only had to crawl under a bed and stay there for about 20 min.

Brian is still designing games, working from home, and he married Fiorella last July in Peru, occasionally travels there, and Enzo is growing and playful, will turn two in April, and both are waiting for the visa backlog to permit them to come to America to rejoin Brian.  And here’s a pic of him with his latest “toy,” a green Camaro!  Dan in San Rafael is doing well, visited us this summer and he’s still working in the deli department at Nuggets, a great company that treats its employees with heath care and discounts and “doer” awards, which Dan has won several times.

As for me, I was busy with the mid-term elections, coordinating postcard and letter-writing to various states, participating in an Indivisible Jersey Shore political group, though we’ve yet to have in-person meetings, delivering meals on wheels a couple times a month, meeting via zoom with my Pi Phi sorority sisters from W&M, and we’ve even occasionally had friends to our house.  Here are my Halloween costume, and me protesting with my friends Kathy and Marybeth.  While our social and travel lives have been slow to rebound, this coming year will change that, for sure.  And it was truly an honor and pleasure to celebrate Al’s Future of Life award in Brooklyn, as well as meeting with friends Cheryl, Steve, and Anne, with whom I traveled into the city to see “1776” with an all-female cast recently.

Best to all of you and enjoy the next year.   

Love,
Alan and Sherri