Hi there, this is James Swanick and you're listening to the Alcohol Free Lifestyle podcast where you learn how to take back control over alcohol and live a life of health, wealth, love and happiness. This is James Swanick joining you from Brisbane, Australia. I'm at the Hamilton Lawn Balls Club of all places and today I want to talk about why 90 days alcohol-free gives you the power to then be able to choose to either remain alcohol-free or do moderation. In my experience anything less than 90 days keeps people stuck in stop, start, stop, start. Maybe you go 60 days quitting alcohol but then you have a drink and then the slippery slope gets you.  So let me just paint the scene for you here. It's 3.27 in the afternoon here on a winter's Australian morning. As I am recording this it is about, I think it's the last week of June, I think it might be June 24 on July the 1st. If you're listening to this before July the 1st we have a 90 day quit drinking program. If you go to jameswanick.com forward slash schedule you can book a free 15 minute strategy session with one of my coaches. It's a free call. You can talk about, talk confidentially of course about your relationship with alcohol.  It's free. Why is it free? Because the only way we know how to help you is by understanding your unique situation and your story. And secondly I know that some of you are going to want help with us executing on the plan that we give you. So some of you will actually end up wanting to work with us in our 90 day and beyond program. So free call at worst case scenario you walk away from that call with a free plan. You go and execute it on your own. Some of you will want some help with executing on that. Then we can book another call and talk about how we will help you. But why 90 days? Like why not 62 days or 6 months or 30 days or 45 days? The neuroscience suggests, well I should say this, there are many conflicting neuroscience studies but most of them seem to suggest that somewhere around 66 days, 90 days, 100 days, 47 days, somewhere around there is how long it takes for we humans to change a habit, to replace a bad habit with a good habit. Now my first business mentor, a man by the name of Tai Lopez, had a product called the 67 steps which came out in 2015, was very successful. He claimed that it took 66 days for a human being to change a habit. That was one of the studies said, so he called his program the 67 steps. It was very successful. Other people say, no it's 100 days, other people say like I said 45, 47 days, somewhere in there. In my experience, every time that I have made a significant change in any area of my life, there's something beautiful around that 90 day, one quarter of a year number or time frame. It's just long enough to get momentum and to see significant change. It's not so short that you don't make a breakthrough. It's not so long that it's boring or dull or it seems unobtainable. It's not so daunting or overwhelming. 90 days, one quarter, maybe a January, February, March or an April, May, June or a July, August, September or a October, November, December. It's something that the human brain can comprehend, latch onto, appreciate, understand, savor and work towards. Now I have been coaching people on how to quit drinking now for six years. I've not started doing this in 2014, I guess officially as a business. I was coaching people for the, you know, since 2010 really just in conversation with friends and family because I quit drinking in 2010. In my experience of helping more than 20,000 people reduce or quit alcohol, 90 days is the sweet spot whereby you overcome the power that alcohol has on you and it gives you that foundation from which you can then choose to do moderation or choose to remain alcohol free. If it's less than that, it's too little of a time. If it's more than that, it doesn't seem, it seems drawn out. It seems like too much of a hurdle, emotional hurdle to begin with and so you don't ever start. It's a sweet spot that the neuroscience seems to suggest is somewhere in that range of time that it takes to change a habit. Now in my 90 day program, which is named Project 90, we have about an 85, 86, 87, 88 percent somewhere around their success rate of people getting to 90 consecutive days alcohol free on their first attempt. Now of the people that we've stayed in contact with who've gone through that program, because I lose touch with some people, but of the people who stayed in contact and give me updates, most of those people have remained alcohol free. People like John Keltner, who's now one of our coaches. In fact, if you book one of those free strategy sessions I was referring to, you may end up actually speaking to John. John is a late 40-something man who lives in Washington State. I'm sorry, that's not true. California, Northern California and has a teenage son and joined our Project 90 program 18 months ago back in December of 2018, and he is still alcohol free to this day. So he got to the 90 days. His goal was to get to 90 days, but then he got to 90 days and he'd already lost, I think, 15 pounds at that time and he thought, well I'll just keep on going and see what happens. And so he just kept on going and now here we are, as I'm recording this in July 2020, he's still alcohol free. If you'd like to see a little video on John sharing his story, you can actually go to jameswanick.com forward slash project 90 testimonials. It's a bit of a long URL I know, but if you go there, you'll be able to see a little video of John sharing his story and you can see a before and after photo of him. I think he's now lost a total of 25 pounds somewhere around there. Another one of our members, Angela Pondsford, Scottish woman, lives in Lenox Head in Australia on the east coast, has two twin daughters or has twin daughters. I probably shouldn't say two twin daughters, should I? Because that would mean four, I think, four kids. If I say twin daughters, that clearly means two. I digress or regress, I'm not sure what the right terminology is. In any case, she has twin daughters and she joined us also December 2018 and she got to the 90 days and she just kept on going and she still hasn't drunk. She's still alcohol free to this day and she loves it and she's choosing to do that and she's got energy and clarity and focus and she feels good and the skin's got better. She's more productive. She's a leader in her business. She manages social media marketing agencies, digital social media marketing agencies and she's someone who's chosen to go forward alcohol free. There's another member we had, Joe Worley. By the way, I'm mentioning these members' names because they have allowed me to share their names publicly. Just to be clear, everything in our group is 100% private and confidential within the group and only those people who I'm mentioning now have agreed to have me share their name and their story publicly. If indeed you join any of my programs, then we're not going to share your name publicly unless of course you give me permission to do so. But Joe Worley is someone who was drinking too much. I think Joe was late 40s early 50s, was married, he tried AA, didn't like it, kept him in shame. He didn't fit into his 34 inch waist jeans anymore. He was overweight. He joined the 90 day program. He lost a ton of weight.  They were feeling very disconnected, but now she's super happy and he's happy and he jokingly said happy wife, happy life or what's the other phrase? It's not as gender specific, happy home, happy home. No, I can't remember. I've lost it. Maybe if you're listening and you know what it is because I mean happy wife, happy life maybe be construed as a bit sexist these days in 2020. That was not my intention, but I think there's some other phrase I heard recently which was more like a happy life, not happy wife, happy life, happy something else. I'm not getting it. Please help me out listeners. Message me at James at jameswanick.com and let me know what it is if you know what I'm trying to say. In any case, his marriage and his home life, his relationship with his wife improved dramatically and he is someone that got to the 90 days and then a couple weeks I think after the 90 days he chose to have a drink and then on occasion over the last I think year since he completed those 90 days he has on occasion had our drink and it's absolutely fine. So he's not so committed that he wants to be completely alcohol free for life. He's choosing to have a drink on occasion. He's got power back over alcohol. Here's what people in my experience do wrong and this is this is based from me observing, communicating, coaching with 20,000 plus people now on this particular subject. Those people who start off by saying I'm going to just do moderation, I'm going to reduce, very rarely do at least consistently and that's because they haven't yet got the power over alcohol. They haven't yet gone those 90 consecutive days, broken the back of it, rewired their brain to understand the concept that you do not need alcohol to relieve you of stress. You don't need alcohol to fit in socially. You don't need alcohol to have courage. You choose to be alcohol free because you love the clarity and the focus and the energy and the great sleep and the beautiful skin and the great body and everything that being alcohol free brings you.  Or no I'm not drinking this month or I'm not drinking midweek or someone offers you a drink could you? Yeah all right I'll just have one and then you have one and it's not like oh thank goodness I get to drink. Oh thank god it's been so long I've been in this prison for so long finally I get to enjoy myself. No that's not it because the enjoyment and the pleasure comes from being alcohol free consistently. In my opinion all of the pain and the suffering comes from having this attractively packaged poison that we call alcohol because it is a poison it is a toxin. The World Health Organization says that there is zero amount of alcohol that has any benefit to you whatsoever. There is zero zero zero benefit to you drinking alcohol zero zero. In fact it's minus something that's how bad it is for you and yet society has tricked us into believing that it's normal it's something that we do to engage to communicate to correspond to bond. I've been doing it alcohol free for 10 and a half years no one would ever accuse me of being disconnected or dull or boring or anti-social. So only coming at it from breaking the back of alcohol first 90 consecutive days alcohol free can you then have the foundation to choose. Now I would offer you this when you go into doing this 90 days into getting to 90 consecutive days if you want to celebrate with a drink on day 90 I will feel that I have failed you because my job is to get you to rewire your brain or to rewire your brain for you or do it with you to a point where you're like wow I see the world differently and now I see the world through a different set of lenses. Now I have this understanding that the special occasion and that the fun and the joy and the beauty and the energy and the clarity comes from being consistently alcohol free and I choose to do that and I step into that and I am not in a prison not drinking I'm freed from the prison not drinking I'm in the prison when I'm drinking I'm free when I'm not drinking and if you're doing this 90 days 90 days just got to get to 90 days then I'm going to have a drink then you are looking at it and feeling into it as if you're in a prison and what a prison is all want to do I want to get out of prison and so to put it in this analogy if you're like in 90 days and you're pleading looking for hoping just wanting to get to 90 days to celebrate then you feel like you're in a prison you're going to want to break out of the prison and be free and being free means you're going to drink the way you used to drink and it's going to cause all those problems again the pain the suffering the extra weight the poor diet broken relationships which is why we rewire your brain inside of our coaching to have you go yes alcohol free is awesome I love this the freedom is being alcohol free I'm choosing this I'm going to go to the pub and the bar and the restaurant with friends and I'm going to powerfully order soda water ice and a piece of lime we're going to powerfully order water I'm going to love it as I'm talking now I'm getting very thirsty it's now 341 in the afternoon I'm about to go into the Hamilton lawn involves club have a very good Wi-Fi here I'm going to do a little bit of work for the rest of the afternoon I'm going to powerfully walk straight into the bar in between the people who were drinking beer in the afternoon go to the barman and I'm going to say may I have a soda water ice and a piece of lime please he's going to say certainly he's going to pour it and hand it to me I'm going to walk away I'm going to sit down at my at one of the tables here log on to the Wi-Fi I'm going to do some work and I'm going to do it while drinking on my soda water ice and a piece of lime later on when 6 30 comes around and more revelers come in and there's more people having drinks at the end of the day at work I'm going to go up to the bar again and I'm going to say can I please grab a soda water ice and a piece of lime I'm going to squeeze the lime into the pint and stir it around I'm going to drink it it's going to taste delicious and rinse and repeat sometimes I'll change the drink up I have chosen to remain alcohol free for 10 and a half years I may drink on occasion again maybe don't feel like it don't even think about it it's not even a big deal for me I'm not like drawing a line in the sand and saying I will never drink again I'm just saying I just choose to be alcohol free and I love it I'm just going to get into my car here so the wind will will change let's get in I'm now in the parking lot or as we say in Australia the car park of the Hamilton Bowles Club here while I finish this off so 90 days that's the amount of time 45 days is too short 30 days is gives you a glimpse like it's a good introduction you can do the 30 day no alcohol challenge that I have which is a nice little baby step introduction into this world just to get a feel for it but certainly the neuroscience and the my experience is is that people who do the 30 day challenge most don't tend to remain alcohol free they feel great but then they're drinking again not not soon after finishing some people do go on which is amazing most people go back to drinking and they look at it more as like a dry january sober october or kind of thing something that they'll do that was you know it was nice to do that one time that was interesting felt great felt amazing but not they'll go straight back into the matrix and into the societal drift where they just drink normally and put on more weight and feel crappy and sleep poorly and perceive their life to be mediocre compared with what it could be so if you feel drawn to a higher level if you feel like you're being held back from something in your life if you feel compelled to want to step into something bigger and generate health wealth love and happiness then I invite you to go for at least 90 consecutive days alcohol free statistically speaking if you try to do it on your own it's unlikely that you will succeed I'm rooting for you those five pillars I mentioned before accountability fun community having skin in the game which means investing in yourself what did I say community accountability fun skin in the game I'm missing one more community accountability coaching community accountability coaching fun I'm missing one thing I've said it so many times I've forgotten it how did I forget it let's try it again coaching accountability community fun skin in the game there they are five those five pillars working in conjunction will get you everything you want not just in quitting drinking but in anything coaching community accountability fun skin in the game skin in the game means you invest in yourself time money something's free you don't value it you don't pay close enough attention to it if you invest to be in a group or coaching mastermind a group of like-minded people for example you pay money each month to be in that you watch it you pay attention to it you focus on it as soon as you pay $7 a month on Netflix you'll start watching Netflix right but I would suggest you probably don't use YouTube as much which is free when you pay you pay attention your energy and your attention goes where your money flows or your energy and attention flows towards where your money goes because you value it so that's why 90 days in my experience is the most powerful if you would like a free strategy session with either John Keltner or one of our former clients turned coaches or possibly me or someone else then you can go to JamesSwanick.com forward slash schedule 15 minute free call we're going to help develop a strategy plan for you to reduce or quit drinking you'll walk away from that call with a plan if you want help executing the plan then we can book another call from that call and then you know two or three days later or a week later we can speak again and we'll walk you through how we can help you thanks for listening hope this was helpful please do subscribe to this podcast if you would leave a review I would so appreciate that I've got a little ad here at the end on the closing credits here where I request a review so I'll leave it up to the ad part to to share a little bit more on that thank you so much for your support I support you and I look forward to talking to you on the next one see you thank you so much for listening I have some free stuff for you if you go to JamesSwanick.com forward slash guide I will send you my formula for reducing or quitting alcohol if you'd like to watch the video versions of these episodes then you can watch them at my youtube channel which is at JamesSwanick if you'd like to send me a direct message on instagram you can do so at JamesSwanick if you would like to try a three day challenge a free three day challenge you can go to JamesSwanick.com forward slash three day challenge if you would like to try the 30 day no alcohol challenge you can go to 30 day no alcohol challenge if you would like to schedule a 15 minute exploratory call with one of my coaches to see how we may be able to help you in your alcohol free journey you can go to JamesSwanick.com forward slash schedule and my request is if indeed you enjoyed this episode or you have enjoyed the podcast would you please go ahead and rate the show in iTunes and would you please write a review a review might just be a sentence saying great listen hey this was fantastic oh i really enjoyed this whenever you give a rating whenever you write a review it surges our podcast up in the rankings enabling more people to see it and hear it and potentially inspiring someone out there to reduce or quit alcohol and potentially transform their life so yes while it does help me to get ratings and to get reviews you will actually be directly contributing to helping someone's life by having them discover this podcast so if you are open to inspiring others and to helping me in the process would you please go ahead and give this episode a ranking and would you please write a review thank you so much for listening and i will catch you on the next one


connecting to the server and we are now live. Okay, so welcome everybody. It's a little bit sad today in some ways because we're actually coming to the official end of this new series of seminars that Trento and I have put together. Simone is here as well actually. I don't know if you want to say something on behalf of Trento as well on the kind of closing talk, just a word of hello and from the Trento side. Yes, so from the Trento side it's not quite the last seminar. We have I think a couple of more seminars so stay tuned for the announcements but it was great. It was really a great seminar series so thank you so much for everybody for participating and Adrian of course for co-hosting and getting this started. Okay, so with no further ado this week's speaker we're certainly going out with a huge firework display because we're really very pleased to announce we have Professor Sandrine Bonny from LMD. She's a Director of Research in LMD in Paris and I was actually looking before the talk at the awards medal. She's been heavily involved in the IPCC process in the past. She has an amazing array of experiences in terms of we've seen in various conferences pictures of her flying micro lights taking measurements in clouds in the boundary layer. She organizes international observation campaigns. She is involved in huge modeling studies and model development. I remember back in my PhD days reading with Orr some of the parameterization developments she was writing an authoring for the LMD model in terms of cloud parameterization. It certainly influenced a lot of my own work in the area and so of course she's got a rich array of awards such as the Bernard Horwitz Memorial Award from the AMS. I see she was also recently been awarded the silver medal of the CNRS. So today we're going to hear actually about some of this observational work that's been going on recently and again not only is it amazing to organize a massive observation campaign but to do it in the middle of a pandemic. I'm amazed how you managed to bring this to a conclusion. So before I eat up all your time I'm going to pass over to Sandrine and say thank you so much for joining us to give this last seminar in the series. Thank you. Well thank you very much Adrian for this nice introduction and good afternoon everyone. It's really a pleasure to be with all of you. I'm sure it would be more fun to be all together in the same room but the good side of the Zoom meeting is that we can be different places together at the same time so there are some advantages. So I'm going to try to share my screen. Let's see if it works. It's not the right one. Okay. Okay. I'll try something else. Sorry. Does it work? Can you see my screen? It's perfect. Yeah, great. Okay so yeah it's... I'm very glad to be able to share with you some of my excitement for the topic that I find really interesting and I hope that you will be convinced that it's very interesting at the end of this talk. It's about the mesoscale organization of clouds in the trade ring regions. You'll probably know that the organization of convection has raised a lot of interest over the years in the community and Adrian is one of the responsible for that. One of the people who raised a lot of interest for this some time ago. And many people are interested in the organization of deep convection but their shallow convection also can organize in different ways and it's at least as interesting as the organization of deep convection I would say. And so I'd like to talk about the mesoscale organization of clouds in a particular type of regime which is a regime of the trade winds. And this type of organization has not been studied very much so far but it's in the trade ring regions that we organized the Uri Kaffir campaign last year as Adrian said. And it was not during the pandemic but right before the pandemic because the campaign finished in February 2020 so just before the start of the pandemic. And so as part of the preparation of this campaign we looked a lot at satellite imagery because we wanted to know what kind of situations we could find during the campaign and that's how we got really interested in this issue of the mesoscale organization of clouds in these regions. So I will tell you what we've learned during the preparation of the campaign and the subject and also what we've started to learn from the campaign itself and obviously it's just preliminary findings because the data processing of the campaign is still ongoing so it's very preliminary stuff but I hope it will at least raise some interest for the campaign. So I'd like to mention first that the work I'm going to present obviously has been done in collaboration with many people mostly from my group but also from people in Germany and particularly with Björn with whom we have organized the campaign together and many young scientists. So when we think of the organization of shadow convection most of the time we think of particular types of organizations and one type which which comes to mind is cloud streets or roads which have been studied for a long time that we can find over the high-latitude oceans but we can also see this type of organization overland sometimes. Another type of organization which has been studied a lot in the past is this type of mesoscale cellular convective systems so I'm going to remove this. So this type of systems can be really spectacular if you look at them in satellite imagery and you can in this picture recognize what we call usually closed cells or open cells depending on whether the clouds are surrounded by clear sky or whether it's clear sky which is surrounded by clouds which depends on the proportion of clear sky and cloudy areas and so the open cells and closed cells are often found close to each other sometimes you have open cells in the middle of closed cells as you can see here. Well so it's a really nice type of organization and there have been many studies already on this topic in the past but and and in particular so in this particular study by Mulbauer they try to recognize these patterns automatically by using a neural network so that they could screen at many satellite images and recognize this type of patterns of closed cells or open cells and then they could make a climatology of these patterns and what they show is that the closed cells can be found mostly over the mid-latitude oceans but also at the eastern side of the ocean basin here so where the ocean is not warm. The open cells are less frequent than the closed cells but they can be found a little bit more widespread as you can see but what I find really interesting in this study that actually the show that over most of the tropical ocean and in particular in the subtropics where it's red we can't find this type of patterns so this type of organizations are very spectacular but they are not representative at all of what's going on in most over most of the tropical oceans and in this study there the type of organization that they find in those regions the name in disorganized MCCs as for disorganized organization if you like because it does not correspond to the classical pattern of closed cells or open cells that has been found as well so the the only cafe campaign that we wanted to organize was going to take place in this area here of the western tropical Atlantic close to Barbados so right in the middle of a red spot so we we wondered what kind what kind of organization we could find there and so in as part of the preparation as a campaign we decided to look at it in more details and so what we did is that with a few colleagues we sat in a in a room for several days looking at satellite images on the big screen for several days and and trying to to detect some prominent patterns of organization and we found that the organization in this area so this is Barbados here this is the Caribbean islands in this area the middle scale organization can be very valuable from one day to the next for instance here you have a day during which clouds organize along lines or arcs like here which are reminiscent of corpus but on on a few days later on on on another day you can find this kind of organization where here it's completely different you can it's still shallow convection and the cloud tops are around 2.5 or 3 kilometers but as you can see here for instance we have clouds that are much more extensive and in particular there is some stratiform anvil at the top of the cloud which can be a several hundred kilometers large separated by very clear sky situations so by looking at many images several hundreds we pointed out the fact that there were four prominent patterns of of cloudiness that we could find in this region and we name we gave names to this pattern because it's much easier to talk about them once you have a name to talk about them so the first type of organization we named it sugar because it really looks like sugar powdered over the ocean and it's it's associated with very shallow clouds very small clouds that you can hardly see from from satellites another type of organization we named it gravel because of the structure the texture of the of the image and it's associated with shallow clouds but also some deeper clouds and another type of organization we named it fish because it looks like the skeleton of a fish it's composed of large clusters of cloudiness with some smaller scale structures within it and the last type of organization we named it flowers because it why it corresponds to the the type of organization we were looking at earlier and that is it's really a beautiful one with associated with the cloud systems with a stratiform and zero so we can look at this so this is now should I say that but the each image here is a domain of about 1000 kilometers by 1000 kilometers so we can look at this patterns from space and we can also look at the clouds that compose these patterns by looking at ground based observations in particular we used the radar that that was installed in the Barbados cloud observatory to look at the cloud types that were found within those patterns and by doing this we we found that there's different patterns associated with different cloud types this sugar type of organization as I said earlier is really associated with those very very shallow and thin clouds that hardly exceed the level of conversation this gravel type of organization is associated also with the presence of this very shallow clouds but also with deeper clouds that can go to three or four kilometers and that can rain really sometimes and and those two types of organization are associated with more extensive cloudiness especially near the inversion level and this one as you can see here very clearly is associated with an angel very thin layer of stratiform cloudiness so this patterns first were identified visually so it was really subjective and but afterwards of course we wondered whether it could be possible to recognize as different patterns in a more automatic way and there are different ways to do that so there were some initiatives to to do it through machine learning and if you want to to do it through machine learning you need a training dataset so what Stephen Rasp told is that they developed a cloud sourcing platform so that many people could contribute and look at satellite images classify the patterns and and then we have a huge classification dataset that can be used as a training dataset for deep learning algorithms and there are different techniques of machine learning that can be used now to to recognize these patterns and in parallel we wondered whether it was possible to recognize as different patterns without machine learning but just using a simple methodology to analyze the satellite images and that's what I'm going to tell you a few words about it because we are going to use it for for the next using that I will show you so here we use two stationary satellite observations in the infrared for 20 years and we try to characterize a special organization of the clouds by using two different metrics one metric is a mean size of the cloud objects of the cloud clusters that we can detect and the other metric is the so-called iorg organization index that was proposed by Adriana which years ago with Adisu semi and that characterizes the distance in between clouds so it's based on the PDF of the distance between the nearest neighbor's clouds so we we did that and we so each we took many days in winter and for each day we we associated one point in this 2d space with a associated with us two metrics so we have a big cloud of points and we try to differentiate four extreme cases of organization so we try to to separate the most contrasted types of organization by considering the first and third size of each metric so that effectively defines four quadrants that we can name abcd right and then we try to see whether there was some relationship between these different quadrants and there the four prominent patterns of organization that we had found visually and that's what we show here we found that this this quadrant for instance was largely associated with the flowers situations but we had identified visually and this quadrant here was associated mostly with sugar type of situations and the two other quadrants were a little bit more ambiguous but at first order they were associated with the predominance of fish or or gravel type of situations so then we renamed this four quadrants as flowers fish gravel and sugar and use this simple method to to recognize the patterns from satellite observations and then we wanted to see whether there were there was some relationship between the cloud patterns and the environmental conditions in which they occur so we consider different environmental properties or variables like the ssd the lower trapezoid stability the wind speed the wind shear etc etc and among those different variables we found two of them that turned out to be most discriminating for the cloud patterns which are the the surface wind speed and the lower trapezoid stability so typically we found that so this is the lower trapezoid stability or the strength of the inversion the level of the trade inversion this is the surface wind speed we found for instance that the flower type of organizations were found mostly when the situation was very windy and very stable while the gravel type of organization was also found when the surface wind speed was strong but the atmosphere was less stable for instance so we looked at this by based on 20 years of data that we could look at it or so for individual seasons for several years and what you can see here is that depending on the year we had the predominance of one type of pattern or another type for instance during this winter season we had mostly fish patterns and it was consistent with the fight that i'm doing this year this season we had a lot of stable situations and low wind speed while on this other season for instance we had the predominance of windy situations and we had mostly gravel and flowers depending on the stability and so on so the the association between the environmental conditions and the type of patterns in prisons was appeared to be quite robust as well more recently jesse caviar it all looked at diagonal variations in in the patterns and they did this by identifying the patterns through machine learning and applying the methodology to the goes 16 satellite observations and they showed that there is also a diagonal modulation of the frequency of the different patterns and when looking at the surface wind speed and the stability they also find that there is different cut patterns are stratified by the wind speed and the stability during all the day and not just one particular time of the day and they found that the diagonal variations were more associated with wind variations during the day than with the stability variations then the question is whether the different patterns have different relative impacts so we looked at this by using the methodology i was discussing earlier to recognize the patterns and we looked at the net cloud relative effects of this pattern so the cloud relative effect is the impact of clouds on the earth's radiation budget at the top of the atmosphere and we looked at this as a function of the low cloud cover associated with each of those patterns and of course when the cloud cover is is larger the clouds have a stronger cooling effect than when the cloud cover is smaller and what we find what we see in this figure here is that at first order if the different patterns have different relative effects and indeed between this pattern and this pattern there is a factor of three briefly of difference at first order we can interpret this difference mostly as a the consequence of the fact that there's different patterns associated with different low cloud covers whether for a given low cloud cover there is also a systematic difference in the relative impact between the different patterns that could be associated with differences in micro physical properties for instance i would say that from this data set it's not obvious it's it's not significant at least but at first order it's really the macroscopic differences between those different patterns that explain the fact that takes a different relative impact so then we can wonder what are the implications of this for for the cloud feedbacks when we want to understand cloud feedbacks especially the low cloud feedbacks what we want to do is to to understand what are the environmental factors how the environmental factors affect the cloud properties right and the relative properties in particular and we do this by considering different environmental conditions and potentially we can consider different cloud types when when we try to relate the environment to the cloud properties and usually we differentiate the cloud types from the vertical structure only but what we've seen here is that there is also a link between the environment and the mesoskeletonization and between the mesoskeletonization and the cloud properties so that we can wonder if to understand this link between the environment and the cloud properties the relative properties in particular whether we need to consider the role of the mesoskeletonization this is an open issue and clearly at the moment I would say that we don't really know whether or not it's important to consider this route to understand this but that's that's an interesting issue at least so we'd like the the models to tell us something about this and to tell us whether they're mesoskeletonization of cloud matters for cloud feedbacks but we don't have the answer yet for this question first of all if we consider climate models like the semi-models obviously these models not represent the mesoskeletonization of shallow convection so they cannot help us very much on this we can consider other types of models like the cloud resolving models or the large eddy simulation models but even in these models representing the different patterns of organization can remain a challenge for different reasons and to appreciate the challenge I'm showing you here this satellite picture again on a scale of a few thousand kilometers here that shows you that at this scale you can really find many different types of patterns sugar here gravel here some flowers and here some fish and the patterns are associated with different space scales so if you have a very high resolution model that can represent mesoskeletonization and some scales if you want to to to look at the sugar type of clouds or maybe even the gravel then it's okay if you have a small domain for your model but if you want to study the fish type of organization of flowers then you need a much larger domain and at the moment most of the cloud feedback studies for low clouds which have been done for using this type of explicit models I've been using very small domains either very very small domains sometimes even smaller than that where you don't have any organization or really very small scale organizations or you have a larger domain like 50 kilometers sometimes 100 kilometers where you start having some organization like cool pools for instance but with this type of domains you cannot get fish or flowers for instance you need an even larger domain but at least we can look at what has been learned about the role of the mesoskeletonization of clouds in the low cloud feedbacks with this type of domains keeping in mind that it's only it considers only the role of some particular types of organizations not the the biggest ones so for instance in this study by Raffaella Fogger she used a large dissimulation model with and without special organization of shallow convection and she did this by using different domain sizes for the simulations and what she showed is that depending on whether she was running on this size of the main or on this one she got very different cloud fraction profiles so at first order the macroscopic properties of the cloud field really were strongly different very different depending on whether or not there was some organization on the large domain or or not and then she also made experiments in which she imposed Fogger warming at the surface and she found that in all cases the cloudiness slightly decreased and the response was much smaller in the case of the large domain than in the case of the small domain so what it shows at least is that there is a potential for the mesoskeletonization of clouds to affect the response of clouds to warming but obviously yeah those results remain quite uncertain because as I said again the simulations represent just some particular types of organizations but at least it says that the organization can really have a huge influence on the microscopic properties of clouds and their response to climate change so if we want to consider more types of mesoskeletonization and we need larger domains and ideally we'd like to have global simulations with a very fine simulation so that we can represent this different organizations and at the moment where we're starting to to see the emergence of this very high global resolution models like here I'm showing you a snapshot from the icon model developed at MPI which is a global 2.5 kilometer model and at this so it's a very short simulation and it's not a climate change simulation not yet but you see that in this simulations at high resolution the models spontaneously simulate something that is reminiscent of what we can see in observations through this type of fish or flower patterns for instance so that's encouraging and say that probably we learn a lot about this pattern and their role in climate with these new types of models but at the same time a resolution of 2.5 kilometers is a little bit coarse if you want to represent really the shallow cumulus processes because the typical size of shallow clouds can be much smaller than that so it raises other problems so it's even for those models it will be very important to understand how realistic the shallow clouds are in these models how they interact with the environment and then ultimately we hope to learn something about the role of cloud feedbacks in cloud feedbacks and the reason why we are really interested in knowing how these clouds might respond to global warming is because as you might know the trade wind clouds are suspected to play an important role in climate sensitivity well they can play an important role by being very sensitive to warming or by not being very sensitive to warming because the trade wind clouds actually correspond to the most prominent type cloud type on earth so depending on how they will respond to warming they will influence the climate sensitivity a lot even if they don't respond to warming that will be a very big constraint on climate sensitivity to know it and at the moment the semi-models as you know exhibit a wide range of climate sensitivities and between the low sensitivity and the high sensitivity models what has been shown is that the difference comes to a large extent to the response of clouds in the trade wind regimes especially in the response of clouds at cloud base so that was one of the strong motivations for organizing this field campaign that the Eurica field campaign because we really want to understand what controls the cloudiness in the trade wind regions and another question now that we we'd like to to address is whether the lack of representation of methods scale organization in these models can be an issue for for the trade community cloud feedback similarly by these models so for all those reasons we are very much interested in the trade wind clouds I was interacting with our environment and that's why we organized the Eurica field campaign with Bjorn and David Farrell from Barbados so there are several overview papers presenting the campaign one that was written before the campaign presenting the motivations and the experimental strategy for the campaign another one presenting what we actually did during the campaign that is I've just been accepted for publication so you can look at these papers if you want to know more about it but so I will present you a few main things about the campaign first so the campaign to place near Barbados here and Barbados is really a great place to to study trade wind clouds because it's here so it's the train winds are blowing like that and so the the clouds that arrive in Barbados are really not been affected by any land mass over thousands of kilometers so it's really very much like being in the middle of the ocean and looking at clouds so it's a great place to observe clouds and in addition what has been shown a few years ago it is studied by Ibrahim Medeiros and with Nyan see that the clouds at Barbados are representative of the clouds of the trade wind regions both in observations and in climate models so it's a nice place to to study this type of cloud so this is where Eurica to place Barbados is here and most of the the operations to place east of Barbados within this circle here and also along the transect more or less aligned with the the trade winds but and initially the Eurica field campaign was meant to focus on cloud processes and their interaction with the palm oil layer and so on but as we were preparing the campaign actually many other groups and and scientists found that it was a great opportunity to address complementary questions and so there there were also initiatives focusing on on characterizing the RC interactions in this region and also the the the impact of ocean eddies and ocean submerses care structures in the and the impact that they could have on the RC interaction so the and the studies developed in particular in this branch here so south of Barbados where we there are big ocean eddies but what I'm going to talk about in the next few minutes we will be mostly based on what we've we've done within this area here east of Barbados so initially the campaign was meant to to use observations from two research aircraft aloe from Germany and the ATR 42 from from France and also observations from the Barbados cloud observatory but because the scope of the campaign increases increased a lot at the end we had many more observing systems and that was great that we had four research aircrafts and we had four research vessels participating we had a big radar installed on Barbados especially for the campaign to measure precipitation and we also had a lot of autonomous observing systems to characterize either the ocean or the atmosphere or the the ocean surface to study the RC interaction and many of the systems actually were very new and some of them were used for the first time and it was really something special for for this campaign there are so many types of observing systems so based on this we had a very rich ensemble of observations for the atmosphere for the operation for the ocean surface and and we can really characterize the atmosphere and the ocean and on a wide range of scales so if i come back to the what we really wanted to do in terms of of god processes initially for this during this campaign we we designed the strategy of the eureka field campaign around this at the beginning it was really based on the and the use of this two aircraft the the german aircraft aloe was flying large circles in their petroposphere at about nine kilometer height and on on board the aircraft there was a rich instrumentation for remote sensing to to observe clouds from above in different ways and also the aircraft had the ability to drop drop zones along the circle so that we could really characterize the environment in which the clouds occur and at the same time that halo was flying this large circles in the petroposphere the french aircraft the atr but also the british aircraft twin otter were flying in the low petroposphere and with the atr in particular we we focused mostly at the cloud base level but also in the sub-cloud layer to observe clouds from from below or within clouds so one of the key measurements that we we did during eureka was measuring the divergence of the large-scale vertical motion that's because we know that there's the large-scale vertical motion is very important in controlling the the the cloud field and a few years ago with beyond we had shown that we could measure the large-scale divergence by using drop zones so if if an aircraft is flying a large circle like that and if we dropped many songs songs along the way then each song measures vertical profile of the horizontal wind and by looking by by using all the drop songs along the circle we can compute the the divergence of the horizontal wind so the the divergence and and by integrating upward we can infer the the large-scale vertical motion so the size of this circle was about 200 kilometers so what we measure is the large-scale vertical motion that what but we can still characterize as being the mesoscale the mesoscale so we we did that a lot during eureka there were three circles in the first half of the day and three circles again in the second half of the day each with 12 drop songs dropped for each circle so many drop songs every day and based on this we can really look at the vertical structure of the divergence and the vertical motion as a function of height and vertical and as a function of time as you can see there is a very rich structure in the profile of mass divergence and by comparing the the measurements on one day to the next we could see that there is also a lot of variability really of the divergence of the vertical motion so if we look at the large-scale vertical motion if we average all the measurements over the over a month over the the whole campaign we see that above the boundary layers the vertical motion is is subsiding and fairly small and that what balances the mesoscale relative cooling that's an order of magnitude that we expect but if you compare this with the measurements that we can get on one particular day at one particular moment of the day you see that the order of magnitude is very different and really the the vertical motion was extremely valuable and even in the boundary layer we could have some subsidence but we could have some large-scale ascending motion as well in the boundary layer that was quite common. Another key measurement in Eureka was the estimate of the mass flux at cloud base and there are different ways through which the mass flux can be estimated but one way that we wanted to use in Eureka was to estimate the mass flux through a mass budget of the sub-cloud layer so if you write the equation for the height of the the mixed layer which is the layer here so the time derivative of the height of this mixed layer depends on the magnitude of the last vertical motion if you have subsidence it pushes the mixed layer downward it also depends on the end-trainment at the top of the mixed layer that depends on the turbulence at the top of the mixed layer and it depends on the mass flux at the cloud base that exports mass out of the sub-cloud layer so if we measure the depth of the mixed layer we measure the mass-scale vertical motion as I explained just before using drop zones and we estimate the entrainment from the surface flexes turbulent flexes and there's other vertical the jumps in the temperature and humidity at the top of the mixed layer then we can estimate the mass flux as a residual and Rafaela Fogel has shown that this methodology could work while she did that using her large by analyzing earlier simulations but then she applied the same methodology to the Eureka observations that's what she's doing it at the moment and here I'm showing you a time evolution of the of the mass flux that has measured during the whole campaign and as you can see there is a lot of variability of the mass flux both on day-to-day variability but also within a given day there is also a large dinar variability of the mass flux then we another key measurement was the cloud-based cloud fraction partly for the reason that I explained earlier the fact that we want to really understand what controls the cloud-based cloud fraction for cloud feedback studies and and to to do this we propose while we can measure the cloud fraction in different ways again but in the in the trades the cloud fraction is very small just a few percent so we need a lot of sampling to get accurate measurements and so for this for this reason we propose to measure the cloud fraction through horizontal LiDAR and radar measurements so by using a LiDAR or LiDAR looking through the windows of the aircraft of the ATR and by using the LiDAR radar synergy we could detect the presence of clouds and finally another key measurement for the campaign was a radiative cooling because we know that in these regions there are many processes which depend on radiation for instance the circulation that some mesoscale circulation can be driven by a radiance in radiative cooling in those regions so what an Aliya Albright and a few colleagues have done is that they used all the soundings of the campaign coming either from radio sounds or from from drop sounds and there were many of them as you can see and for each sounding they computed the vertical profile of radiative cooling in clear sky so that we have this great data set now finding in terms of mesoscale organization during Eureka we we were lucky enough to sample a large diversity of cloud types and and cloud patterns so on this day for instance we had something like a fish type fish pattern here we had something like flowers like here we had gravel and on these days we had well we don't see the clouds on these images but we had mostly sugar clouds so we we we could sample the different types of organization that was nice so if you want to to remember something from Eureka actually it was really a campaign during which we were able to characterize the clouds and the environment of clouds on a very wide range of scales and through many many different types of measurements so we could characterize the mesoscale was a large scale through satellite observations through radar measurements we could measure characterize a very microscopic scale for instance some people were looking at the individual cloud droplets and how they aggregate from rain for instance within clouds there were many radars looking from the top looking sideways or upward or and there were high-resolution radiometers to look at clouds with very very good resolution and there were macro physical measurements within clouds as well measuring the cloud water content vertical velocity and so on and in addition to that for the environment we had measurements of the last kind of vertical motion we had measurements as a surface but surface flexes and much more so it really we have a very large dataset now that that can be used for a wide range of process studies if you're interested in clouds and their interaction with the environment so now I am I hope I don't know how I am in time but I'm going to to give you a few first insights from the campaign so one first lesson from the campaign that was very clear is that shallow convection generates a lot of cold pools and we see we saw many of them during the campaign you see this this arcs here the developer around this deep clouds here while deep they go up to a few kilometers only but you really see this cold pool so it's not only in regimes of deep convection that we can find cold pools but also in regimes of shallow convection they are very common you can see them also very clearly from aircraft pictures and the cold pools can be very well detected from the soundings so it's not only by looking at the horizontal heterogeneity of temperature and humidity that you can detect them but also by looking at the soundings because they are associated with a very shallow mixed layer and so some people like Ludovic Tuzepaefer they characterize the cold pools during your weekend and they showed that they were colder than the environment a bit moisture than the environment and windier and of course the cold pools were only one type of organization that were observed and and we as I said earlier we really observed a large range of organizations and what we we are very much interested in in my group is trying to understand what how what controls those different patterns of organization and in particular we know that in the trades the cloudiness is strongly related to what's going on in the sub-cloud layer particularly the presence of thermals or coherent circulations so we really wanted to to characterize this connection and we did this mostly by using data from the ATR and from the drop zones so on board the ATR we had turbulence measurements we could measure temperature, humidity and winds at 25 Earths which because we were flying at about 100 meter per second it gives us a special resolution of about four meters so very high resolution and based on these fluctuations we could detect the presence of of boundary layer thermals so we can count them we can as a characterize the size of the thermals so over Eureka on average we found that we had a mean density of thermals of about one thermal every kilometer and we found that 20 to 30 percent of the thermals were kept by a cloud so with a horizontal LiDAR radar measurements we could characterize a cloud field within the rectangle around which the ATR was flying and develop a cloud mask with a resolution of 25 meters and based on this we can compute the cloud base cloud fraction so it's a small number on average about four or five percent but what's interesting is that first of all the estimate of the cloud base cloud fraction is fairly consistent while it's still preliminary analysis and data but at first order it's fairly consistent amount of different measurements that we had on board the aircraft from remote sensing or from EC2 observations and what's interesting is that the cloud base cloud fraction as you can see varies a lot from one day to the next which was a bit different from what had been suggested before the campaign where people thought that it would be a more or less constant so here we see some some variations and because we expect the cloud base cloud fraction to be related to the presence of thermals we looked at whether there were there was some relationship between the variations of the cloud base cloud fraction and the density of cloudy thermals so this was derived either from LiDAR radar measurements or from EC2 measurements and that was derived from the turbulence measurements on board the aircraft and we do find a close connection between the two so if we want to interpret the variations of the cloud base cloud fraction then we have to look at what can modulate the density of cloudy thermals and we looked at different environmental conditions that could affect this and we found at least wait it's really ongoing work but we found at least two properties of the environment that seem to be important for the modulating the density of cloudy thermals in particular the strength of the mesoskeletal vertical velocity in the water atmosphere and the surface wind speed and the flights during which we had the more the many thermals were associated with strong wind speed conditions and large-scale ascent in the boundary layer but now if we're looking at the link with the mesoskeletal organization at first we can be a little bit disappointed because if here I featured three different days three different flights that were clearly associated with different cloud types and different patterns of cloudiness and yet if you look at the cloud base cloud fraction they are more or less the same cloud base so it seems that the mesoskeletal organization at first order is not imprinted in the cloud base cloud fraction however if we look instead of looking at the total cloud fraction at cloud base we look at the individual clouds and we look at the size distribution of individual clouds then it's very different here I'm showing the size distribution of the cloud base the cloud basis and in this case when we had mostly sugar clouds we have only a very small cloud cloud basis well in this cases we have many cases of very small cloud bases but there's also a smaller number of much larger cloud bases so we looked at this more systematically for every flight of the campaign and we found that really the size distribution can really be interpreted as a mixture of two populations of clouds one population which corresponds to many clouds of very small size and another population associated with smaller fewer clouds but much larger cloud bases so we found that we could fit the size distribution with a mixed exponential function so two exponentials each exponential representing one cloud population or one mode of the cloud population and each mode being characterized by two parameters one is the fraction of the population that this mode represents and the other parameter being the the length scale of this mode which corresponds to the mean size of the of the cloud population in this mode so we did this for every flight and this is the first mode for the different flights so on average the the length scale for this mode is is quite small it's about 100 meters on average so it's what we infer from the LiDAR radar measurements and actually it's interesting that there if we look at the size distribution of the cloudy thermals that we can infer from the turbulence data in situ data then we find that the mean size of the cloudy thermals is also about 100 meters so the way we interpret this first mode is that corresponds to the cloud that gap individual thermals and that's why we have so many and they're associated with small cloud sizes but there is a second mode and the length scale of this second mode is very valuable from when that is next as you can see here the length scale can vary from a few hundred meters to a few kilometers what we found is that this second mode the length scale of this second mode is very much related to the presence of of rain so when we have a large cloud basis is when we have a lot of precipitation and the way we can interpret this relationship is the fact that when we have a large cloud base then the clouds are associated with a weaker entrainment and therefore the clouds can go deeper and can generate precipitation more easily and what's interesting is that there seems also to be some connection or relationship between the size of the cloud basis and the different cloud types that compose the mesoscale patterns of cloudiness for instance on this flight here we had a sugar type of situation so very small clouds we had the single mode of single cloud population associated with very small clouds and in this case we had a larger cloud basis and then we had the superposition of small clouds but also a few deeper clouds and when we have even larger cloud basis then it's when we start having rain and and even deeper clouds and the formation of stratiform cloudiness near the inversion level so it seems that the size distribution of cloud basis might be important to understand how we we go from one type of cloud types to another and understand the the emergence of these different patterns of cloudiness so then the next question is what controls the size of the cloud base as we've seen the typical size of thermals is about 100 meters or a shoe at maximum a shoe 100 meters so the the large cloud bases of a few kilometers are much wider than this which suggests that they might be associated with an aggregation of thermals but then the next question is why do we have such an aggregation of thermals so it could be related to to the surface heterogeneities potentially or it can be related to internal organization within the sub cloud layer so we're starting to started to look at this using the turbulence data set again it's very much work in progress but you're looking at the spectrum of vertical velocity within the sub cloud layer for instance we find that there are typical characteristic length scales which most of the time are of the order of one kilometer which is consistent with the mean density of thermals that we found that was we have about one thermal every kilometer in these regions but sometimes we have those characteristic length scales which are much larger than that and so now the the question is what what how to interpret this and and this is yeah really work in progress so I will conclude now because I think I've been a bit too long but as I am I hope I have convinced you that the shallow clouds can really organize in many different ways and the organization that you can sign in the trade winds regions is really interesting because it can be very diverse this organization is associated with different types of clouds and and there's different organizations depend on the environmental conditions and and they can they have different relative impacts so that they could play a role potentially in cloud feedback so we are not sure about it yet thanks to Eureka we can start trying to understand what controls these different patterns of organization and our first analysis suggests that the organization of shallow convection is imprinted in the size distribution of clouds at cloud base that shallow rain mostly forms from clustering and that the large cloud bases are associated potentially with our coherent middle-scale organizations in the sub-cloud layer but it's yeah it's really a work in progress the very preliminary findings and we hope to test this hypothesis further in the future so thank you very much thank you very much Sandrine maybe so that I can see you thank you very much you were saying about the advantages of the the zoom meeting one of the disadvantages though is you can't hear everybody clapping at home I assure you there's ruptuous applause and carrying around the internet so I've got a couple of questions coming in and I've actually got one or two of my own the first person actually I'm going to hand over to is Daniel and then to Simone let me just ask to unmute okay oops sorry I clicked twice Daniel you should be able to speak now okay yeah so thank you Sandrine that there was a great talk very very interesting um I just was wondering if you had if you had the chance during Eureka to look at any aerosol impacts in particular maybe the Saharan dust that probably has some strong impact there so yes there were aerosol measurements and as you might know in Barbados is a great place to to measure aerosols and it's been historically a place with aerosol measurements especially to to look at these aerosols coming from Africa so there are several decades of measurements and during Eureka we did measure aerosols as well and we had a few episodes of dust indeed a lot of dust coming from Africa and apparently according I'm not a specialist of aerosols but according to some colleagues it seemed that in winter usually we don't have so much so many intrusions or arrival of dust aerosols from Africa but apparently this time we have more and more we have this more and more often even in winter and we had a few episodes during the campaign so yeah that can be an opportunity to look at how they affect different things okay thank you sorry Daniel um we also have a question of clarification from Menorah um so yeah so um as far the definition of the limits for the four groups of four types of clouds I'm not sure and understood properly how you defined the the limits between them so I remember that group where there was the the ABCD groups and and this gray crossing the middle to separate them to make sure that the groups were far away but how did you decide like what's A and what's gray what's nothing as an example so in our in our classification of the organizations using satellite observations we defined the four groups of organizations in a very super simple way we just look consider the first and last size of each metric right so we didn't know priori whether it was flowers, gravel or anything else we just wanted to distinguish contrasted types of organization that's all that just afterwards that we looked at what type of patterns had been classified visually for these different quadrants and that's when we we found out that one quadrant was mostly corresponding to flower patterns and and so on but at first we just wanted to to distinguish different types of organization not knowing whether it was flowers sugar or anything else but


My work is primarily in the security conflict domain more so than the development domain, but I think there are some interesting, obviously, meeting points, and especially with the topic of this conference, some obvious ones. I've been asked to speak, I'm going to try to do three things, which is never a good idea when you're doing a presentation, but I'll keep most focus on the middle part. I'm going to review some of the literature on the relationship between youth bulges or age structure transitions and conflict and instability, and focus on how education can be a mediator in this relationship, which is based on a paper I've done together with Bilal Barakat for the World Bank, which we are updating now for wider. And then make some brief comments on some of the extensions here that we're working on in a new PREO project in collaboration with the African School of Economics in Benin on the broader demographic dividends, and this also ties nicely into some of the comments made by the commissioner this morning about youth as an asset and a partner in long-term peace building. So for those of you who follow some of the discussions in the demographic, political demography field, there is now extensive focus on some of these mega trends and the impact these will have fundamentally on development and also political and security domains, where we see both shifting demographic weights globally, adding to the shifting geopolitics that we're seeing. We're seeing population aging in the global north, and perhaps more importantly, so both for security and development, age structure transitions in the global south happening at very different pace. We're also seeing rapid urbanization, while that is an interesting and important and I think to some extent neglected area also in the security field. My focus here is going to be on the age structure transitions in the global south. We heard this morning that we're now seeing the largest youth populations that have been observed historically. That's true. If you look at the solid line, that's the number of youth and we're now at around 1.2 billion youth between the ages of 15 and 24. That is going to increase somewhat over the next decades, but not a whole lot. We've reached a bit of a plateau, but if you look at the dotted line, the peak youth, if you want, in relative terms was actually back in the mid-1970s. This is the proportion of youth between 15 and 24 as a proportion of 15 years plus. We are seeing youth in most region declining as a proportion of the adult population, but as you can imagine, this is looking very differently across the globe. This is what we then define as youth bulges. As you can see with the European line at the bottom, the light blue, we're now well below 15% of the adult population being 15 to 24-year-olds. While we've seen very significant declines in Asia and it says North Africa should be North Africa in the Middle East, and we've seen some of the most spectacular declines in many Middle Eastern countries like Iran that since the early 1990s have gone from having 5.5 children per woman now down to less than two. There are in many Arab countries and other Middle Eastern countries similar declines in fertility, similar with Asian countries, and of course East Asia is a well-known case, but there are also other spectacular declines in fertility that results in these declines overall in youth bulges. The region that is somewhat behind in their demographic transition is sub-Saharan Africa where fertility is still high in many countries, but where we are seeing now fertility coming down also on this continent, and the expectation is that this will likely continue, but of course with considerable uncertainties. So what do we know about youth bulges and instability? Arguably large youth bulges can be associated both with increased motives for conflict associated with grievances over lack of access to education to political participation and to employment, and at least an outcome, but also opportunity for conflict in the sense that they're depressing the cost of conflict. So youth generally have low opportunity costs, and that is something that generally facilitates recruitment, and particularly in settings with low levels of education and low opportunities in the labor market. And then you on top of that have the what demographic political demographers refer to as relative court-sized effects, where you have an increased pressure, special male wages in societies with large and increasing youth populations. There are a number of studies that have looked at the relationship between youth bulges and armed conflict, and a study that I did back in 2006 found very clear and strong effects of increased risk of armed conflict onset of youth bulges. Weber back in 2010 did a study showing that greater political instability was a result of these age-structured transitions, Nugas and Davenport, and a report in a study on government repression that governments respond with higher levels of repression in the face of youth bulges, and interestingly, and I'll build on this a little bit, there seems to be an effect, the effect of large youth bulges seems to be something that is primarily identified in high fertility contexts, meaning in the early phases of the demographic transition or the second demographic transition from high to low fertility. And this indicates that when states and societies are moving from high fertility to low fertility contexts, it means that there is an opening for what we often refer to as the demographic dividend or the demographic bonus. And this is where we segue into the issue of precisely when can we draw on these enormous resources that youth represent in society moving from youth being seen as a risk factor to a question about how we may be able to realize the demographic dividend. And the sort of core idea behind the demographic dividend, which has been empirically observed in the Asian tiger economists primarily, and was first identified there as a significant factor, then being estimated to have contributed roughly to a third of the economic growth of the tiger economists growth in 1970s, 1980s, and early 90s, the core idea is that declining depends ratio, so the fewer depends as a result of decreasing fertility both leads to increasing labor supply, when the prior large youth, the young courts then grow up to become part of labor supply, and then investments can be shifted away from schooling and healthcare in the sort of high fertility, from the high fertility setting. Obviously this is dependent on conditional on the labor market and on human capital investments, so this is often referred to as a demographic window of opportunity, it doesn't have to be realized, but it depends on these conditional factors where education is one of them. The sort of the classical demographic situation is the one of South Korea, and here you will see that the blue line is the youth bulges in South Korea going back to 1950, starting to decline already in the early 1980s, and at the same time as the support ratio, which is the opposite of the dependency ratio, so the number of supporters, meaning those between the ages of 15 and 64 in the population per dependent, under 15 and over 64, so as the fertility is declining, support ratio is increasing, and South Korea is now at level with more than two and a half supporters per dependent, it will decline rapidly in South Korea in the years to come, but this is the ideal scenario for a demographic window of opportunity. If we're looking at support ratios worldwide, we can see that the areas that are currently seeing the highest support ratios are Asia and also Latin America, with latter largely seen as having not being able to take advantage of their demographic window of opportunity, while Sub-Saharan Africa is still as a region, just a little bit above one to one in terms of support to dependence. So it's a very different, and it's up in the next decade to come, still very low support ratios in most Sub-Saharan African countries. So education, which was the basis for the paper that we did for the World Bank, we're looking into the potential mediating role of education as a factor that increases economic opportunities in society for youth bolsters, again contingent on the labour market and economic opportunities more broadly. There have also been concerns from the perspective of security conflict analysis that if you increase education, access to education especially secondary and tertiary education too rapidly, that might contribute to expand also expectations and that unmet expectations can backfire in the sense of also increasing potential for instability as a result of that. And there has been some concerns obviously over the relevance and quality of education, which isn't easily measurable in the data that we are using, which is data from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, which has some extremely nice and useful back projections on cohorts and gender going back to 1970 for 120 countries. And we also use this to project forward. If just very briefly looking at our main focus is on male secondary education, because this has been the primary focus area, but we're also interested in looking at gender parity in education. I'll return to that briefly, but as this graph shows, if you're looking at male secondary education in many of the fragile contexts that we're studying, the level of education is still low, even though there has been progress certainly since 2000, but this is one of the major concerns when it comes to the mediating effect in high fragile contexts. The interesting, so the usefulness of this data is also that you can in the projections consider the reciprocal effect of education on population development. These are two population pyramids for Niger in 2050, showing the impact of education, both in terms of qualifying the coming generations, with yellow here being primary education, red being no education, and blue being secondary and dark blue tertiary education. So not only is Niger, we're in the bottom version of the Niger population in 2050, following a fast track scenario, one that is much more educated, it's also a much smaller population as a result of education feeding back into lower fertility. So what we find in this study is that the provision of male secondary education is significantly reducing conflict, indeed the effect of youth bulges is restricted to low education domains, and youth bulges and low education are the interaction of youth bulges and low education is particularly strong in low and middle income countries. We're also seeing that rapid expansions in education do not elevate risks, which has been a major concern, and again that gender parity in education is actually something that lowers risk and net of the effect of male education on this relationship. Finally, just a couple of words on where we're going from here. The collaboration that we have now with the African School of Economics looking into ways that states and particularly states in South Africa and Africa can position themselves for the demographic window of opportunity that will arise over the decades to come, and particularly understanding the effects of education on realizing dividends, looking both at social, political and economic dividends, such as the potential driver of youth as drivers of changing norms and attitudes regarding social inclusion on the continent, the forms of political participation and inclusion, and also the impact of human capital expansion to youth inclusion in the economy in sub-Saharan Africa. So on that note, I see my time is out. Thank you very much.


It is now time for Member Statements. The Member from Leeds-Grenville. Thanks, Speaker. I rise to commend participants in today's mom or mothers and others' march at Queen's Park in support of eating disorder sufferers, their families and their friends. Let me first begin by acknowledging members of the National Initiative for Eating Disorders who are with us today, including their founder and president, Wendy Prescoe. It was an honour to speak at their march and to host their press conference earlier this afternoon. This was an emotional day, Speaker, and I want to thank you for the tremendous strength and courage that all the members have shown today. Know this, your efforts are shining a light on eating disorders and providing a beacon of hope to those suffering in the shadows. Today's mom march at Queen's Park is one of six in Canada, in conjunction with one on Capitol Hill in Washington. These marches are sending a message that our health care system must do better in treating, diagnosing and raising public awareness about eating disorders. The need to act couldn't be more urgent. We know eating disorders are 12 times more likely to lead to death than any other mental illness, but there is hope for treatment, and that's why I wrote to Minister Hoskins in May. He asked him to be a champion for this devastating mental illness and for Ontario to lead the way in developing a national strategy on eating disorders. The lack of action is disappointing. But on behalf of those who have an eating disorder and the hundreds of thousands of family members suffering with them, I want to repeat that call. We need to do better and we need to start today. Thank you, Speaker. Thank you for the member's statements, the member from Algoma, Manitoulin. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I would like to take the opportunity to highlight an outstanding man I met over the summer month, named Ian Boss. On the 16th of January 2015, his father, Ted Boss, passed away after a brave fight with cancer. On the 21st of May 2015, Ian departed from the east coast on a cross-country walk in memory of his father and in honour of the excellent care his father, Ted, received. Ian's goal was to raise $25,000 for the Aberdeen Palliative Care Society and to raise funds and awareness for palliative care societies across Canada, the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association, and the Provincial Palliative Care Associations. Yesterday, Ian arrived in Vancouver, toured the Legislative Assembly, and completed his final two kilometres before dipping his feet in the west coast waters, bringing closer to an amazing feat. Congratulations, Ian, for completing this incredible journey which lasted 159 days and covered over 6,000 kilometres. Every community that Ian stopped into, every person he met, everyone who walked along Ian has learned a great deal from Ian's experience. Thank you for your inspiration, Ian, and for challenging many Canadians raising awareness of palliative care and for the importance of hospice homes and workers across the country. End of life care matters. It really does. It was a joy and honour to share part of this walk with you, and I hope our path cross again. Thank you. Thank you. Member States, the member for Scarborough Rouge River. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I rise today on the occasion of Manufacturing Month, and to recognise a hallmark company in Scarborough, Atlantic Packaging Products Limited, who is celebrating its 70th anniversary. Starting as a family-owned paper bag company in 1945, Atlantic Packaging currently employs approximately 1,400 people and has 21 manufacturing plants and warehouses providing good manufacturing jobs right here in Ontario. The Ontario government played a part in this growth, too, as their Whitby Papermill was able to add jobs last year, thanks to the help of Ontario's Industrial Electricity Incentive Program. Through this mill and other sites, Atlantic continues to lead in clean energy. This project creates steam from papermill-residual biosolids to reduce natural gas consumption. Early on, Atlantic pioneered the use of a hundred percent recycled container board in North America, and currently this process results in saving over 15 million trees per year. At the heart of this company lies a true entrepreneurial spirit headed by Mr. Irvin Granovsky, the chairman. Atlantic Packaging is a shining example of how employee innovation, management techniques and technology can lead to growth that is sustainable and environmentally friendly. So I would like to mark their 70th anniversary on the occasion of manufacturing month and commend them for bringing good jobs to Ontario and making our province grow. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you. Further member statements? Member for Velvet, Middlesex, London. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I'd like to bring statements with regards to MS, multiple sclerosis. Canada has the highest rate of multiple sclerosis in the world. Not only do 100,000 Canadians live with the disease, but their families, friends and communities do as well. In Ontario, over 37,000 people are living with this disease. The unpredictability and invisible nature of the disease creates a challenge for Canadians living with MS and their caregivers as it affects their employment and financial security. Canadians with MS need our support to ensure continued employment while respecting the daily challenges they face. It is our job as parliamentarians to ensure that policies are in place so that MS patients have access to quality coordinated care. We need to streamline the drug approval process to ensure new medications and treatments are available for MS patients. We need to ensure the ADP process paperwork is minimized to ensure patients have access to the aids they will need. Today, Mr. Speaker, I carry around a carnation to show my solidarity with the MS community and the fight against MS. I urge each of us to join the fight and NMS in our lifetime and affect positive change in the lives of those impacted by the disease today. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you. Further members Davis, the member from Hamilton East, Stony Creek. Thank you, Speaker. Speaker, US Steel bought Stelco in 2007 based on one 31 promises around employment, production, capital investment, pension funding and community support. It has broken those promises again and again, enabled by Harper's federal government. In September, it transferred many of its Canadian contracts to its U.S. plants. Now it says the very loss of those contracts, which it caused, means it can't afford to meet its obligations. US Steel Canada has stopped paying property taxes in municipalities like the city of Hamilton and it has suspended health, medical and dental benefits and life insurance for 20,000 families and retirees. This is both an insult and an injury to the people who have suffered enormous health difficulties because of their work. My office has heard from countless pensioners who cannot afford the essential medicines. They fear for their lives, Speaker. I would like to acknowledge the provincial government and the Minister of Finance for providing $3 million in emergency transitional assistance. The fund will, over the next six months, help retirees with critical health needs and facilitate their transition to any available support schemes such as the Trillium Drug Program or the Ontario Drug Benefit Program. But this fund will not and could never be enough and won't last long, Speaker. There will be mounting health care bills for US Steel's actions, which will be borne by the retirees themselves, their families, their communities and ultimately the province as well. Speaker, broken promises lead to broken budgets and broken lives. Thank you. Further member states, the member from Mississauga-Brempton South. Mr. Speaker, October is Manufacturing Month in Ontario and I'm proud to celebrate with the Canadian manufacturers and exporters in Ontario. In my great riding Mississauga-Brempton South and all over Ontario, manufacturing is an essential part of the economy. Despite changes in our manufacturing base and fierce global competition, the sector grows stronger each day due in part to the spirit of innovation which drives modern manufacturing. Mr. Speaker, our government is working closely with the industry to foster innovation by leveraging investments like Pratt and Whitney in Mississauga to help it sees new opportunities and create great jobs. Bison transports new facility in my riding is also a sign of manufacturing strength. Bison just opened a $25 million state-of-the-art 19,000 square foot terminal that makes it a transport leader throughout the region. I'm so very proud of the many companies in my riding for their hard work, for their leadership and for the thousands of great jobs they provide to my constituents. Mr. Speaker, I'm also proud to be a part of the government that supports our manufacturers in the province of Ontario. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Thanks very much, Mr. Speaker. The Salgie Memorial Hospital in Southampton has become a true testimony to the difference that dedicated citizens can make. And I am pleased that the community will finally achieve their goal of a new emergency room and laboratory in their local hospital. The project will expand the emergency and lab departments a change that has been needed for quite some time. And just imagine, to get into the waiting hall, if you will, of a hospital, you would have to walk through a triage. And essentially, Mr. Speaker, that's the reality they've been living with for too long. And it's the waiting room in the ER. It's not air-conditioned. They could only find a way to prop a small fan above the doorway to the hallway where people lined up in chairs waiting for their turn to see a doctor. This improvement has been needed for years. And now, with the ministerial approval granted to tenure the project, it is expected that the project will be completed finally by fall of 2018. While the profits provides the bulk of the funding, the role of the community has been vital to the project's success. Volunteers and supportive community members came through and worked tirelessly towards the $2.9 million goal. And to quote the fundraising chair, Tony shared, they are this close, Speaker. I'm pleased to say that, as of this past summer, the campaign is a mere $150,000 away from its fundraising goal and they're going to achieve it. Congratulations. And all I have to say to wrap up this, do not forget about the current hospital. Thank you. Thank you. Will the member stand? Is the member from Cambridge? Thank you, Speaker. I'm very proud to have been a part of the fight against multiple sclerosis. For many years in my community of Cambridge, and indeed in Waterloo Region, I've cared for individuals and their families dealing with multiple sclerosis. As a community nurse, a critical care nurse, and as a care coordinator for the Community Care Access Centre, these families have complex needs trying to raise children, work, and plan for their futures. With Canada having the highest rate of MS in the world, it's our job as public servants to support citizens of this great country when they're faced with such an unpredictable disease. As my colleague across the way said earlier, in Ontario over 37,000 people are living with this disease, and those Ontarians faced a host of physical, mental, and economic effects brought on by the disease itself and the challenges it creates for these people and those that are caring for them. I encourage my fellow members to advocate for income and employment support systems which will ensure that those that are affected by MS will get the help that they need as soon as they need it. Quality and coordinated healthcare is also integral to ensure that those living with MS and their loved ones can continue to live healthy, independent, and fulfilling lives. Speaker, today I am standing in my place in my fight against MS, and I encourage all of you in the House to do so, as well as the constituents in my riding. We need to show a solid area against MS. Thank you. Thank you. Further remember statements. The members from Newmark have a word. Well, thank you, Speaker. I rise today on your behalf to honour a community in your riding that has come together to show support for Evan Levassage, who's been battling brain cancer for five of his seven years. This past weekend, the entire community in the small town of St. George in the riding of Brandt bought Christmas to Evan. On Saturday, a parade with more than two dozen floats, including Santa Claus himself, passed by Evan's house in St. George. When Evan's family learned that their son's brain tumor had spread, they decided to celebrate Christmas early this year at the suggestion of their doctors. With only two days of organising, the community showed an outpouring of support for the request of Evan's family. 7,000 people joined Saturday's celebration. More than double the population of this small town in Brandt. They lined Evan's street, cheering as he passed by the festive lit houses sitting next to Santa in his sleigh. During the ceremonies, Brandt County police and firefighters presented Evan with uniforms and made him their honorary member. Children handed him cards. Evan's neighbours decked out their homes with lights and decorations. Snow machines blew for hours, blanketing parts of Evan's street in gentle snowfall. His family says they are still overwhelmed by the response from their town and from the presents and messages they've received that they've received from their incredibly caring community in St. George and throughout Brandt, Ontario, Canada and beyond. Today through you, Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the great people of St. George, your constituents, for the way they supported this boy and his family at this very difficult time. May we all respond with the same compassion and generosity to the people in need in all our communities. Merry Christmas, Evan. Thank you. I did give them some extra time. Thank you. I thank all members for their statements. Thank you.