Nuclear winter continues to be the most important thing I work on.  Our Physicists Coalition for Nuclear Threat Reduction, initiated at Princeton two years ago, is now hosted by the Arms Control Association.  So far the coalition has more than 1100 members, and I have given 15 of the more than 100 presentations they have arranged.  This past year I gave three talks about nuclear winter at conferences, and another 12 invited talks, including at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where they design and make the nuclear weapons, to the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Defense Department in the French Senate, and to journalists who cover the atomic file.  That resulted in me appearing nationwide on Science Friday on National Public Radio with Ira Flato.  Brian Toon and I are still trying to get our book on dinosaurs and nuclear winter published.

    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 one postdoc and three graduate students.  Lili and I each got a new research grant from the Future of Life Institute to allow us to continue our nuclear winter research.  One of the previous postdocs, Sam Rabin, has taken a position at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.  You can read about our team at https://sites.rutgers.edu/risci-lab/people/.

     Altogether in 2023, I published 5 refereed journal articles and 3 other articles, with one more in press, and one article in review, both 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 Google h-index is now 105.

    We were able to take some nice trips this year.  In January, we went to Puglia and Sicily with our friends Gene and Ellen Sherman.  We had never been to this part of Italy, the southernmost, and had a great time.  The food and wine were great, and we lucked out with the weather.  It only rained a little one day, and the temperatures were in the 60's Fahrenheit.  Here's sunrise over Europe as we flew across the Atlantic, and then the Dolomites on the way to the heel of the boot of Italy.  We stayed first in Monopoli, a charming fishing village, with strange street decorations.  Our hotel was along the old fortress wall.  The first day we arrived we had lunch with the local Primitivo wine, and I partook of the local seafood.  That night we ate at a fancy restaurant where the waiter offered us our choice of the fresh fish, and then brought us our choice.  The next day we visited Matera, with its church on a rock overlooking the gorge.  We also stopped at Alberobello, with its famous conical roofs, which could be dismantled when the tax assessors came.  I had more seafood, and dessert that night was spectacular.  Sunrise the next day also provided a complete double rainbow.  We also visited an olive oil farm, where they served us a nice meal, including the local specialty, orecchiette (not my favorite). and one of the oldest olive trees in the world, said to be more than 1000 years old.  The view from Ostuni of the olive groves was called the green ocean.  We then went to Lecce, with an attractive (on the outside) hotel, but it was rather worn and noisy at night.  Lecce has an old Roman arena, excellent gelato and pastry, and a church with metal doors that show the Sun and Moon through.  They have interesting pizza, and trust me, this one has sausage and Sun-dried tomatoes.  I liked this yellow car.  We also visited the cathedral in Otranto, with spectacular mosaic flooring.  From Otranto you can see Albania, and a sculpture made of an abandoned refugee ship. Brindisi is the end of the Appian Way and a nice harbor.

   We then flew to Sicily for an excellent one-week Road Scholar tour.  But the day before the tour began we were given a tour by Boris Behnke, leader of the Etna volcanic observatory.  He is a friend of Fabio Florindo, with whom I edit the Reviews of Geophysics.  Even the wine is influenced by Etna.  Boris first drove us up through the snow to a lava flow just beneath the peak that had destroyed a resort hotel.  There were snowballs, views, and more views.  We went to a monument to a priest who prayed and saved his town from another lava flow.  There was a church with basalt columns from the volcano and stained glass of an eruption.  We also went around to the west side of the volcano and saw ruins of another eruption.  Eruptions are important there, but there is wine.  From our hotel in Taormina, you could see red lava at night on the volcano.  It was a charming town, with an old Roman amphitheater with Rosa, our excellent guide, and views of Etna from everywhere.  At sunset one day there was a beautiful altocumulus lenticularus cloud in the lee of the volcano (and see the fancy hotel on the left where the second season of White Lotus was filmed), and I thought it might make a nice sunset, so we went back to the deck on the roof of the hotel and watched.  I was not wrong.  As the Sun set, the clouds got red, and changed shape.  My favorite also shows smoke from the volcano and Venus in the sky, as well as red lava, which was easier to see as it got darker.  For breakfast, you could make your own canoli, which I enjoyed.  That day we took a cooking lesson, starting in the market.  We cooked caponata and made our own pasta.  We were proud.  The cook prepared a fish crusted in salt.  The ladies had some wine as we waited for the food to cook.  We very much enjoyed the first course, and then the fish was brought out.  Later Boris came by, and gave us lecture about Etna.  The next day we drove down to Siracusa, home of Archimedes, and the largest and most powerful city in Greecian empire at the time.  We were shown the remains of spectacular quarries, dug by African slaves, and used as a location for the last Raiders of the Lost Ark movie this year, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.  Sherri and I fast-forwarded through the movie just to see the one minute of that scene, but the movie was pretty terrible.  Around the back of the quarry, was the best-preserved Roman amphitheater in the world, because it was carved out of the mountain side and did not have pieces that could be stolen and repurposed.  This a black pepper tree along the walk.  The next day the wind shifted, and the altocumulus lenticularis was in a different position, without such a dramatic sunset.  Gene and Ellen enjoyed dinner that night.  The next day we went to Catania, and visited the opera house, with a dramatic interior.  At the fish market we sampled charcoal-grilled artichokes.  There was another interesting street.  We sampled the famous booby cake, demonstrated here.  Gene and I enjoyed (well, he did) cigars on the terrace.  We had singing for our next dinner.   The next day we took an old train around part of Etna.  One place we stopped was to see ricotta cheese being made.  It was dripping after a lot of stirring, and he also showed us the final product.  Here are one last view of the coastline and the lava.  The next day we flew home.  Here is the sunrise as we arrived in Rome on the way.  It was a fabulous trip, and it exceeded all my expectations.

     We rented a great house a 20-minute walk from campus in Berkeley, with a beautiful living room and backyard, where I could just barely squeeze my car into the carport.  They were ready for me, and have bike racks that you could expect in Berkeley.  (If you don't know the origin of the peace sign ☮, click here for an auto-running short PowerPoint.)  And Berkeley had great, professional graffiti on their STOP signs, as you might also expect.  Soon after our arrival in February, Brian, Danny, and Vivi came to visit.  Of course, they were spoiled with desserts.  They really liked the concrete slide at Rose Park, a steep walk up above our house.  Danny and Vivi slid down on cardboard sleds.  They also climbed trees in the park.  We took them to Shorebird Park, where they made friends with the ground squirrel, all of which they named "Gilbert."  Of course, we spent time with Dan, who lives in Brian's house in San Rafael.  And we took their former nanny Marilu to dinner.  We visited the remains of the Sutro Baths.  Danny got together with Ruben, an online friend from San Jose.  Here's a sunset from in front of our house.  I got my own office and parking space.  My office building is behind me.  Unfortunately, my stay at the university did not result in any lasting research projects.  Everyone there was nice, but our interests did not coincide.  However, we were able to see friends and visit the area (with many local walks from this guidebook):  Bob Bornstein and Sureyya Ozsoy, murals inside the Coit Tower, Michael and Camille Wehner, Mt. Diablo, with views of a wind farm to the north, a nice walk around the top, and California poppies along the road.  Believe it or not, there are occasional hailstorms in Berkeley.  There are sequioa forests.  I like this yellow car.  We went to Salesforce Park with Bob and Sureyya, Ocean Beach and Cliff House (now closed, unfortunately), Golden Gate Park, with nice tulips and trees.  One day we went to Point Reyes (photo from our trip there in December), with the view to the north, the lighthouse, and whales.  We saw how much the earth shifted from the 1906 earthquake.  There is a Rosie the Riveter National Historical Park along San Francisco Bay to honor the women who worked there in a converted Ford assembly plant during WW II.  The campus has beautiful trees here and here, nice libraries here and here, a view over International House, where I visited 50 years after I lived there in the summer of 1973, and a dinosaur.  We watched a Wyang Kulit performance from the front and the back, but got a clang overdose and left before the end.  People's Park is still there  Here is the April 12 gathering, a holiday there.  We went to Mt. Tamalpais with Dan, with a view of Sausalito and San Francisco.  One day the Make Sunsets guys (who will send balloons with particles up into the stratosphere if you pay them) did a demonstration in a San Francisco Park, until they were kicked out.  Goodbye.  (They claim they are doing climate intevention (geoengineering), but on the scale they are working it would have no impact.) Here's a view of the Bay with some fog.  We had some great food, including sashimi at our local restaurant, and our last meal at Chez Panisse.  Goodbye, Berkeley.

    We missed Paris, and by chance were able to rent an apartment in late May where we had stayed before in the 5th next to the old Roman arena.  I also arranged to give a talk on nuclear winter at the French Senate, thanks to retired general Bernard Noillan, now an anti-nuclear activist.  After my talk, we were treated to a tour of the French Senate building, which is the Luxembourg Palace, formerly the residence of Catherine de Medici, in the Jardin du Luxembourg.  We saw the gold room, with our friend Constance Konold and Napoleon's throne.  We were also able to visit the Jardin des Plantes and the Place des Vosges, and see the reconstruction of Notre Dame underway, which involves a lot of deforestation.  Yayoi Kusama was there decorating the Loius Vuitton store. We ate our favorite restaurant, Les Fêtes Galantes, which still has my old business card on the wall. We also consumed some of our favorites, almond croissant and baguettes.  We made it to the Atelier des Lumières, which had a Chagall show, and saw the Degas/Manet presentation at the Musée d'Orsay, but the best stuff was upstairs in the permanent collection.  We had dinner with our friends Laure and Paul Dubus-Malmassari.  It was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Picasso, and we saw some of his stuff at the Musée de l'Homme, which also afforded a nice view over Paris.  We ended the trip with some delicious ice cream.  We will go back.

    In June I was invited to a conference in Albuquerque on "Covering the Atomic File," for "Atomic Reporters" - those working in nuclear issues.  I met many impressive presenters, including Archbishop John Wester, a strong anti-nuclear activist from New Mexico, and Tina Cordova, Co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium.  Her family lives in Tularosa, New Mexico, just downwind from the Trinity Site, where they tested the first atomic bomb, and she educated us that the first victims of American atomic weapons were Americans.  The fallout caused terrible medical impacts including cancer and premature death, and the U.S. government still has not accepted responsibility.  We visited Trinity Site, and saw the Schmidt/MacDonald ranch house, where the plutonium core for the "gadget," was assembled, and then driven to the Trinity Site and hoisted up 100 feet.  Here's a re-creation from the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, with a B-29, sister ship of the Enola Gay.  The museum also has a B-52, still in service, and models of Fat Man and Little Boy.  At Alamagordo, we were able to touch some Trinite, but not take any.  It is a really spooky site.  The meeting was in preparation for the release of Oppenheimer. It is a great movie, but leaves out the impacts on New Mexicans who mined the uranium, did the dirty work at Los Alamos, and suffered from the bombing, as well as nuclear winter.  I hope, in addition to my Science Friday broadcast, the press will continue to cover this issue.

    In July I attended our 13th annual GeoMIP Workshop at the Univ. of Exeter, locally hosted by Jim Haywood.  Landing in London I was able to see Tower  Bridge, the Shard, the Walkie-Talkie, and the Gherkin, the City and the O2 Arena, and the London Eye.  The workshop was very successful, and resulted in a plan for a new climate model experiment.  We had a nice conference dinner overlooking the Devon countryside.  One evening we rode bikes along the Exe River to a pub for a pint.  Of course, I had a full English breakfast one day, but only one day.  It was great to spend time with my former student and friend, Juan Carlos Antuña, who now lives in Spain.  I spent one extra day in London after the workshop, and visited the British Museum to see some of the stuff the Brits stole from their conquests, from the Parthenon, the Nereid Monument, and the Rosetta Stone.  But I have already been to Forest Hills, Roland Garros, and Melbourne Park, and my main goal was to go to my fourth Grand Slam tennis tournament.  For months I had been clicking on the Wimbledon website to see if any tickets were available, and the night before I was going to join the early morning queue at Wimbledon, a miracle occurred and I was able to buy a ticket to Court No. 1 online.  I was able to sit courtside for a lady's match for a set between Haddad Maia and Cirstea, but then it began to rain, and I was happy to have a seat in a stadium with a roof.  I watched the entire Medvedev match, but seated next to a drunk Russian who kept shouting encouragement in Russian.  My Apple Watch told me it was loud inside.  But he did share some of his famous Wimbledon strawberries with me.  I then stayed for part of the Sabalenka match, but it was not that interesting and since the rain had stopped went outside to Henman Hill, the results of the excavation to make Court One.  There are two large screens on the side of the building, and I realized that, as exciting as it is to see the action in person, watching on TV allows closeups and instant replays, and I was able to watch action from both Court No. 1 and Centre Court.  It was a wonderful experince.  My last meal in London was an excellent fish and chips.  They sold Pimm's at Wimbledon, but I did not try it.  However, in the United lounge at Heathrow the next day, it was availabe for free, so I tried it.  One sip told me it is sweetish flavored alcohol, and not to my taste.  As I was leaving the chap giving it out asked if I liked it.  I told him, and he said, "Try some gin."  It told him that it was too early (it was still morning) for me.  Those Brits and their booze!

    Later in July, Dan, Brian, Danny, and Vivi visited us.  Danny and Vivi patronized Carlson's Corner as we watched fireworks one Thursday night.  We walked on the Spring Lake Boardwalk with Dan.  Lili Xia and her family, including her parents, who were visiting from China visited us, and taught us how to make dumplings, which were delicious.  Sherri and I saw a deer a couple blocks from our house on a walk, and we see them regularly, including in our yard at night here and here.  We also have other wildlife, such as this wasp.  We also drove up to Lake George with Danny and Vivi to spend a couple days with Gene Sherman to celebrate his 75th birthday.  The girls and boys went kayaking.  We had lunch with Ian and Norma Gilson, who dropped by in their camper van, Noah (Ian's brother) and Cynthia Gilson, and Gene and Ellen, who took Danny and Vivi on a ride in the lake on a float behind their boat.  Gene and Ian and I sang Varsity.  Danny enjoyed toasted marshmallows.  When we got home we also enjoyed lunch with Gera and Tanya, who were visiting from Saudi Arabia, at Kathy and Tim's house.

    In October, I took advantage of the opportunity during a research meeting at the University of Minnesota to visit Dinkytown (with Cheryl Harrison, Lili Xia, and Jessica Gurevitch), where Bob Dylan lived during the one semester he sort of attended the university.  I'm positive this is the 4th Street he made famous.

    Later in October I attended a Workshop on The Increasing Danger of Nuclear Weapons: How Physicists Can Help Reduce the Threat, at the International Center for Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, Italy.  We stayed at a guesthouse along the Adriatic, and these are the views from my room to the north and south.  Next door in a park is the Miramare Castle, and "was built from 1856 to 1860 for Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian and his wife, Charlotte of Belgium, later Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico and Empress Carlota of Mexico," according to Wikipedia.  It is now a museum with fancy rooms, including a library and this one, and a view to the south of the city of Trieste.  I went there for a day, and despite this canal and pizza (not a good as in New Jersey), I was not very impressed.

    I presented a poster at the Fall AGU Meeting in San Francisco in December.  It was great to be back there.  My Monday night Editor's Dinner was a cruise on the Bay, where I saw fog over the peninsula with the Sutro Tower emerging out of it, the Golden Gate Bridge from below, the city, Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge from the north and the south, and Oracle Park.  Sherri and I got to meet Amitav Ghosh, an invited speaker for the conference at the President's Reception.  I took a Cable Car up the hill to a reception for former AAAS Science Fellows. The view from the fancy club where they had it was grand.  Here's what I looked like when I was a Congressional Science Fellow.  We had lunch with Bob and Sureyya and visited the Presidio Tunnel Tops park with Dan and then the Diego Rivera mural Pan American Unity at the Museum of Modern Art.  Here are closeups of his wife Frida Kahlo and some inventors.  Goodbye, San Francisco.

    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.  But since we have had the solar panels for 15 years, the SRECs are no longer available, but we'll still keep getting the free electricity.

    I saw Arlo Guthrie at Monmouth University on April 28.  Mostly he talked, but he also sang a few songs.  I very much enjoyed it.  And I went to my 49th Bob Dylan concert, with Sherri, on November 20 in Newark.  It was mostly songs from his latest album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, and I would have enjoyed it more hearing some of the earlier great songs.  But I'll still try to make it to 50, if he and I are still able in the future.   Joe Martucci, a former Rutgers student and now a weatherman in Atlantic City, remembered my article about Bob Dylan and the weather and invited me to do a podcast on the topic soon after the concert.  Enjoy.

    The Badgers had a rough season with many injuries, but still managed to make it to a bowl game on New Year's Day playing LSU.  The new coach still has to prove his worth, but we'll see.

Sherri:  

    Halloween was a fun time to visit New Orleans, where I swiped Danny’s Pokemon hat for a fun picture, also tricked and treated, and ate too much candy and beignets and other NOLA foods! And their recent Christmas visit was a treat because Brian helped with the gift-purchases so that the kids could open them when they arrived, and we had one of their favorite NJ foods, Squan Tavern pizza for dinner that evening, and a few additional times as well!  I spent time trying to get them involved in activities that were not with screens here and here.  My longtime friend, Anne, brought her grandchildren over and the kids had fun with them, played Wii and Four Square.  Brian was able to see one of his high school friends, Gerald, with whom he went into the city, and we all went to a hibachi dinner with Brian and Dan’s former babysitter, Jane Baldino, and children and grandchildren. Grandpa made a fire and they roasted marshmallows, and on their last dinner here I made one of Vivi’s favorites, Chinese chicken, and Grandpa and Vivi made ikura.  Earlier in December I went with Al to San Francisco, saw Dan, who continues to root for the Giants, and works at Nugget Markets in Corte Madera, and was chosen as a “Duer” for the month of October!  We also visited SF MOMA, saw another Kusama exhibit, and I took the ferry to Sausalito to see our old apartment we rented while there in 2011, ate deep-fried French toast at Fred’s, and spent the night at Dan’s “Danny Cave” (formerly the Granny Cave), and had Sol Food, a yummy San Rafael place. We also drove to Napa to lunch with a high school friend, Marilyn,  and met Camille, a travel-with-husbands friend, downtown. Brian’s wife, Fiorella, continues to wait for her visa, and Enzo, now 2 ½, is as cute as ever, and Brian still works remotely as a CGI artist, allowing him to visit them occasionally.

   The rest of the year has been a good one for me, even though my left leg is bothering me a little, so am taking physical therapy to help with some muscle pain, but still manage to walk about 2 miles or more each day, either around the neighborhood or at the shore, and do meditation and dance at my local gym, so continue to have my one piece of chocolate (okay, sometimes 2) each day.  I’m also volunteering with Meals on Wheels and docenting on the Rwandan genocide at Brookdale’s Holocaust Center, and having lunch and dinner with former colleagues at Brookdale and my local political group, the Liberal Ladies Lunch, and from time to time, zoom with former Pi Phi sisters and have started to meet occasionally with my Together Women Rise group. So, life is good, my health is as well, and am continuing to age, but also to engage, with friends, family, community, the world, and, in 2024, will step up the political stuff to make the U.S. and the world a better place. And, thanks to the love of my life, Al, for helping to make much of my great life possible.

   Best to all of you and enjoy the next year.