Being a very deep cricket enthusiast and now somewhat involved with the sport, I see with admiration the rise and rise and rise of Virat Kohli. I see his energy on the field, I see his energy off the field. I see the way he is transforming and rewriting the rules of the game. The T20 format, 140 to 160 was par score. He's redefined it, now 190 is sub par. 250. 250, 240. There is something within him that propels him more than others. There are many people who are talented. There are many people who have this ability, but there are few who realize this ability. What is it that takes one to realize that he can do a little more, he can inspire more, he can create more, he can create new standards? Is there something from within or is it something from outside? What is it? I have also been watching Virat Kohli with interest because I have seen every great batsman in the last forty, forty-five years. Very few have hit the ball the way he is hitting it. Probably the only other person that I can think of is Vivian Richards who used to hit the ball like this. I think he was the only one who was striking the ball the way this boy is striking today, which is very rare. Most people who have watched only cricket on the television don't understand this probably. It's one of the most dangerous games on the planet. A hard ball is coming at you over hundred and thirty, hundred and forty kilometers per hour. And this is the only sport where the ball is pitched and it swings this way, that way, which gives you a fraction of a second to make your decision how to handle that ball. It's… it's a very dangerous game. You must… you know the bowling machines, they may be there in Calcutta, yes? The bowling machines are there.  At eighty or ninety kilometers, just make… set the bowling machine at ninety kilometers and stand there and see how the ball comes at you. It's crazy, okay? So every ball is different the way it's coming at you. So it needs to be handled. Everybody who's there, we must understand, is very good. They may look clumsy, they may get out for zero, but they're very good with what they're doing. But somebody stands out like this. This reminds me of… there was a motorcycle rider who was known as… whose name was Kenny Roberts, who won the world championships five times in a row. People couldn't believe it because you have to win sixteen races across the country to get to the championship. All the machines are prepared by the top companies and the talent is at the highest level. But winning five in a row was considered unprecedented and impossible. So they asked him, how do you do this? So he said, I go out of control with control. I understand that very well. I live every step of my life like that, always out of control but with control. This is what everybody is seeking.  But their longing for safety and security makes them insulate themselves from that little madness. Then they wonder, what's happened to my life? It's become boring and no good. They try to step out, then they get hit by something. They again build walls around them. This process is going on. So when you take an example like this, one thing is the zeal. Another thing is loving what you're doing, really loving what you're doing, that's what you want to do. Now, I think recently Virat Kohli came on the television and said, my only problem is I get angry. I want to be like a monk, something he said, whatever, his own version of being wanting to come. With the kind of talent he has, he is going to be a phenomena. He's going to be a new cricketing story on the planet, not just one more player. He has the necessary ingredients. I said this when he was seventeen, I saw him playing in Singapore for the under-eighteen team or something, he was captaining that team at that time. I saw this boy playing and then only I said, this guy will go far. And then he vanished out of my radar for almost five, six years and then he surfaced suddenly one day in the test in the Indian team. And now he's going the way he's going. If he learns to be a cool fire, not a fire that burns him up, then he will do things which probably has not been done for a long time.


And my name is Andreas. I have been following this community for a bit of over one year now. I have never given a talk before, so I thought why not do it in the last talk of 2018. So I have been using WordPress on my daily life and also for work pretty much on a daily basis for the last five years. I usually enjoy building stuff with WordPress that are beyond blocking. So for example, I have done some logistic solutions, some registration platforms and so on. But today the talk will be related to how you can build and manage a community of people, a community of users using WordPress as your backbone. And this is what we do on our business, on our website Just Run Lab, which I am one of the co-founders.  Now I am going to share with you about how was our mindset when we got started and maybe you can find some ideas to apply yourself. Why is this? This is not really working. This is jumping around like crazy. Which pattern? This is the first slide, the next slide. So after that I will become a little bit technical, talk about some plugins that you might need to use when you manage a large number of users. Talk about how you can keep growing your community and close with a challenge of opportunities that come along the way. So starting with who we are today, we are JustRun Lab.com, the largest website for runners and active individuals in Asia Pacific. We have about 300,000 users that give us about close to 800 pages per month. The main functionality that people use us now is to discover events and register on our platform. They can also get discounted tickets. We have a very new dashboard where you can keep track of the events that you joined. You can keep track of your progress and unlock badges. So we are working a little bit in gamification of running. But what I'm here to discuss today is about this function where people can start their own blog on our website. We have about 150 authors at the moment and the community keeps growing. But let's see how we started. So it was back in 2013. And that was a time where I had just arrived in Singapore a few months ago. I was interested, I'm still interested in running myself. I was a bit fitter back then. And it was December, so Singapore month I was coming up. There were thousands of people literally out in the streets running, but there was no platform, no website for people to discuss. People to find information and review the events. So I thought, why not do one myself? And the first thing I did is I just bought a $10 domain on Bluehost.com and I launched three different platforms. So one was a forum on phbb2, which is a free platform. The blog of course on WordPress plus a Facebook page, which of course you can do it for free. And just like that, just when I was born, and I will show you how it looked like. But before that, I need to share this, that if you are not embarrassed with the first version of a product, you launch too late. So I'm a bit embarrassed about the design, but I will show you anyway. So this is how just when I looked in 2013-14. This is our first logo and the homepage. So you can see we started having articles, blogs, forums, the running event calendar, which now evolved to be the ticketing platform. But most importantly, when we focus today, it's about this button over here. So you can see that it says bloggers are wanted, join the team. And this is how we started building the community. So back to the mindset that we had during the first month, how you can apply this to your case. First thing to do is you need to pick a subject that you really like, because you will end up talking and working on it basically every day. The good news is no matter how specialized and weird your interest might be, you are not the only one who has this interest online. You will always be able to join you. And maybe you don't want to go too broad in the beginning. So if you, for example, you're interested in cooking, you might start with, I don't know, cupcakes first and then go into different recipes. Next point is that in the beginning, you should take this as a hobby. It's not the time to start thinking about your protection of your IP or your business plan or P&L, this kind of thing. There will be a time for that later. Very, very important. These days a lot of things are free online. So of course we have WordPress, we have free forums, a lot of premium software. So you get Canva, for example, for your graphic design. You can get Cloudflare for your security casting and a lot of other resources. Use the forums, use free resources, stack overflow. Next is about your content itself. So you need to be committed and consistent. If you want to attract other people to work with you and write for you and create content for you, first you need to create content yourself. Last is, I think, yeah, don't quit your days off yet. If you are lucky, there might be a time for that later. But it takes time. Because here we're talking about community building. We're not talking about a fast-track explosive growth startup model. All right, so once you set up your blog, you start creating your own content, how to attract people. First thing is you need to let them know that they can join you. So this is an actual graphic that we created. We posted on our home page, as you saw, as well as our Facebook page and so on. And very important is you need to find people that share the same passion and do what they do for the right reasons. So you need to come up with a few lines to actually set the expectations, tell them what you expect from them, and try to give something in return. So right now this is, we are in a position where we can give free tickets, we can give free products or blogs, but it wasn't like this in the beginning. So just try to think some ways to reward them. But on the other hand, you don't want to make this a very business transaction. So you don't want people to write for you just to get something out of it in return. You really want people to write because they love it. So you need to balance this a little bit. Next step, very important, is make it easy to join. So we have a very simple form with a few things that people need to fill in. We get this form, then we set up the account for them. And when things start getting a little bit more difficult, is you need to start thinking about how you're going to manage the people. So this is a screen so that I took yesterday from our admin panel. As you can see now, we have about 90,000 registered users, each account. So when you come to a stage like this, a workplace management is a little bit difficult. So you need to plan ahead. And I will show you now some of the ideas and plugins that you need to start using. So now it's become a little bit technical. So the first thing is you need to understand what are user roles, what are capabilities in WordPress. By default, you might have seen this screen when you tried to create a new user. By default, WordPress comes with six predefined roles, which are administration, editor, author, contributor, subscriber. The idea behind assigning roles to every user is that different roles can perform different tasks, which are called capabilities. So for example, you wouldn't want your commercial subscriber to be able to delete posts, or maybe approve posts, or edit other people's posts. So by default, all these roles have certain limitations. Then the good news is that you don't have to be limited to the six roles. You can actually extend this to as many roles as you want. Throughout the slides, I will just recommend a few plugins, which are free. So you can maybe keep notes if you want to. So for example, with user role editor, you can add any number of roles that you want, and give them capabilities. So here is a screenshot of how it looks. So you will see that I have created a role here called Just Run Lab Logger. And this specific role is able to edit posts. But for example, you cannot delete posts from other people. So as you start having different levels of users, you need to start making this kind of plan. Some other example would be that subscribers can rate posts, but they cannot publish posts. So there's a hierarchy. The next idea is you need to think about decluttering your backend. And what I mean by that, this is how our actual website looks like for the admin. So you can actually see there's a million settings options here, as well as the toolbar is quite loaded. You can set up things like the actual post layout. You can add new categories. You can choose tags, whatever.  So you need to make it a bit easier for them. So this is the same website, the same exact page, but how it looks from the blogger. The way to do this is by plugging, which is really great. It's called Adminimize. How it works is you will go and find all the roles that you have assigned. We'll put it in columns. Then you will go and find all the basically actions and display options that exist in your WordPress. By default, everything will be accept, which means that everybody can see everything. But you can start deactivating things for different accounts. So you can see, for example, that administrator can do everything because nothing is checked. And as we move towards less important roles, we see more restrictions. The last thing that becomes very important is your automation of communications. So there will be cases where, for example, somebody submits a new post for review. They will need to know that their post has been received, it's pending moderation. On the same time, your moderator will need to receive an email so that he knows that he needs to go in and either approve or reject the post. Okay, so there's this plugin called Post Status Notifies. It's free again. And what you can do is you can set different triggers. You can set different emails. You can set who will be the recipient and basically automate the whole workflow. Okay, last three very small but quite essential plugins that I found. By custom login, you can basically use your own logo on the login page. This one is very funny. It's a great plugin. It does what it says, require feature image, which means that if there's no feature image set, nobody can submit or publish a post. And I found this because we always had the problem where people upload media inside the post but they forget to set the feature image. So yeah, this makes things easier. I just want to show that basically no matter what you think about, there's probably a plugin and it's probably free, so it's great. And on a general note, you will definitely need a very good plugin for your forms. I totally recommend Formidable. You can do even more advanced things like automated user creation the moment they submit. You can do ratings basically by your imagination. Okay, so now that we have our process in place, how do we engage our members to grow the community? The first thing would be to guide your newcomers. So this is the actual email that even today people receive once they set the account. I just want to stress these three things you need to tell them what to expect. So how long it's going to take for the post to be published, what will happen once the post is published, all these kinds of things. And you probably don't want to give them too many information at first. So I just literally only show them how to get started. If they want to look at the guide, I just link them to YouTube. So far it has worked. Most people know more or less what to do. So nothing more is needed. You need to keep educating your authors around their way. One idea would be to create a mailing list only from the people who write for you or Facebook group or something like this. You need to keep letting them know of new features. So for example, last year we launched a feature where you can create a review and then bend it to your post. Of course we cannot expect that people will go and dig up for this by themselves so we need to let them know how to do it. And since they are already familiar with the editor, you can just create a short visual guide for them. Don't forget to give them credit because they do work for you. So this is how the blogger page looks for us right now. So all these things are totally customized. They upload, they can customize their page. You get a counter, a number of posts. If you click on bloggers by all, you will see all the data that they have submitted and things like this. Of course, author box on every of the posts, you can go a bit further and create special tags so people know that this person is a blogger, is not paid by you, which actually is a good thing to do. Yeah, very important. Let them be themselves. Don't add it too much. So I will show you two actual posts and this is from our Facebook. So what we do is we post every first post on our Facebook as well. So this guy literally starts, I'm not like most reviewers who sugarcoat things. So he's trying to be himself and the engagement is literally amazing. And as you can see, this is totally organic. There's no nothing paid. On the other hand, you will see that his photo is a bit blurry. It's not what you would call a professional post, but this is what we see the communities like. This is another example of another girl being herself with amazing engagement. And I mean, like I said, these people, the English is not great. Their photos are not great, but how they can connect to the community is really great. So try to do that. Next is try for your community to see you as a friend, not as a vendor. So one simple example that we do, we have the birthday of every one of our members. We send them a personalized card.  If you're a girl, you will get a female runner, different colors, all these kind of things. You'll be surprised how many people actually reply to this email and say thank you. It's a really nice thing to receive always. Okay, again, after a point when you hopefully have made some money as well, try to reward your users. This is again an actual example. We created this, it's a medal basically. We send it to our top bloggers along with a very short note. Basically, we just told them thank you for your contribution. We could have not done it without you. And as you can see, it's not only good for them, it's also good for you because they will go ahead and post it on the social media so you keep getting the word out. Okay, of course, with growth there's always challenges. So here I have you to keep in mind. Again, when you're managing so many people, you try on the other hand to keep a consistent branding. It might be challenging. So different people might want to use different colors. So you need to find a balance to what you can allow and what you cannot allow. Technical side becomes quite difficult. One problem is the constant updates of WordPress and plugins. So now Sean will show us the good thing. I need to communicate this to 150 people. See how. Security becomes important when you have, you're basically dealing with personal information, passwords of thousands of people, so you need to take it seriously. System architecture administrator becomes a big headache. For example, many of you might be familiar with caching, the idea of caching, but when you serve a website which is totally customized to the user, these ideas don't work anymore, so you need to start planning differently. And of course things like how you optimize in SEO, but at the same time accommodating so many different writing styles. Other things to keep in mind, what guidelines you set. Is there any conflict of interest? So for example, is there someone who is just trying to get into your website to sell his own product or something like that. And of course legal IPs might arise as well. Also with challenge come opportunity. So first is like, I saw the growth is organic and can be viral and is free. And as an example, these are all generated post by the community. We didn't spend a single dollar on Instagram, for example. You end up creating brand ambassadors organically. And funny enough, this is not a teaser that we produce and sold. She actually downloaded the logo, she printed on her teaser herself. So how great is that? And as you grow, you move along, there comes a time when you start to think of it as a business, you need to start thinking about how to monetize what you have. I'm not saying to monetize the bloggers, so we don't do, we don't manage them or promote them or make money out of them in any way. But we do try to find other ways. For example, we sell tickets, we sell advertising space, so on. Yeah, I think that's all I wanted to share. These are all the plugins that I showed, so you can take a photo of this. These are my contact details. Feel free to reach out for anything. And if you have any ideas, so you are interested in what we do, drop us a line. We're always looking for people to work with. So thank you.


I'm the Comic Weekly Man, the Jolly Comic Weekly Man, and I'm here to read the funnies to you happy boys and honeys. Yes, boys and girls, it's comic weekly time.  Right out of the pages of Pock the Comic Weekly, straight into your living room, your friend the Comic Weekly Man, the Jolly Comic Weekly Man. Hello, hello, hello. Little Miss Ani, how are you today? I'm wonderful. Well, that's wonderful. As a matter of fact, it's just marvelous. You funny man. Very well. What man never does a day's work in his life? Off doesn't work. Hoped you're on the wrong track. I'll tell you, it's a night watcher. Oh, that's nice. That's why it's never in the day. Yeah. Funny. Pock the Comic Weekly? Yes. Very well, I will in just a moment. But before I do, let's listen to this nice man. Here we go again with Pock the Comic Weekly. And on top of the first page, Snuckum, snuckum, snuckum. Very well, since you're so eager, Beaver. Magic words for the music, please. Very well, my lady. Diddle-de-da, diddle-de-do. We go make a mukum. Let's have a little tune for little Snuckums. Today, a man is trying to sell Archie an accident policy, which guarantees Archie that if he becomes hurt through an accident, the insurance company will pay him the money for doctor bills. Archie sits in his chair in the living room talking to the salesman. And he says, you see, I've never had an accident. You see?   Then onto the salesman head. No sooner do they settle it again down to business, then Snuckum's train whizzes across the floor and hits the salesman on the foot. Oh! Last picture, the salesman walks out of the house angrily. He yells back at Archie. You really ought to have an accident policy, but not with my company. And Archie asked, but why? And the salesman takes a look at Snuckum standing there with two guns in his hands. And instead of answering, dashes down the road. Yes, Archie spoke a little too soon when he said that he never had accidents in their house. Yes, he said he did have a lot of them happen all at once. From now on when Archie has business callers, he better sit underneath a net. Sitting under a net? Well, no. Oh, over the page we go to Flash Gordon, because he's on a strange planet. And Flash's rocket ship and gun melted before the Ray Wizard's magic rays. So Flash is on the planet without anything to protect himself. Yes, and Queen Suni like Flash, but the Ray Wizard has made her turn Flash over to him. So now read so we can see what the Wizard is going to do with Flash. Very well, here we go with Flash Gordon. Rega rega doon doon, saskimatage. Let's have music for heroic Flash. Wizard is going to execute Flash for having brought metal to the planet. Flash is taken to the Wizard's Ray vaults for execution. Hidden Bowman will shoot him if he steps off the dais before the executioner emerges from the fiery Ray vault. Curso the Ray Wizard smiles. Their only chance for life is to conquer the executioner and nobody ever has. Flash is left alone in the execution chamber. He peers through the fiery vault, trying to see the executioner. Last picture top row, the Wizard executioner looms through the Ray vault. Flash, unarmed, tries desperately to grab him. The Wizard laughs as Flash's hand clutches only the searing fog wisps. First picture bottom row, behind soundproof one-way glass. Dale vainly tries to warn Flash of the danger behind him, while the executioner has slipped around behind Flash and moves soundlessly to strike. While Flash gropes futile for the enemy, he thinks is hidden in the Ray fog. Suddenly, Flash has a hunch that the Ray fog is only a trick to distract his attention. Whirling quickly, he catches the stalking executioner by surprise and knocks him down.  Soon he points out that Flash has won and demands that Curso, the magician, let Flash go free. Curso replies angrily. Yes, Flash is free. But your life and crown are forfeited if he breaks my Ray lords. And the girl, Dale, must still face a Ray or Dale. Yes, I'm afraid so. Well, yeah. Well, let's hope so. Now, let's go across the page of Dixie Dentures because they're so wonderful because Dick is dreaming he's in the early days of America. When America was just a young, young country even before it had a flag. Well, every country should have a flag. Yes, and today's story is about our country's flag. Oh, goodie, quickly please. Very well then. Here we go with Dick's adventures and say the magic words with me. Riggity-pack-a-zack-a-zack. Write some music for adventureless Dick. Back go the centuries. And Dick, dreaming, finds himself in Philadelphia in the great days of 1776. Gosh, here we are fighting against the king all the 13 states together, and we haven't even got a flag.  One hears a voice behind him saying, don't lose that package you're carrying, Corporal. And come along. Dick looks up and exclaims, yes. Oh, it's General Washington. Where are we going, I wonder? Last picture top roll, they stop before a door and Washington knocks saying, here we are. Dick looks up at the sign above the door and reads, Betsy Ross, upholsterer. Betsy Ross. And a moment later, they're inside the house. Washington has unwrapped the package. First picture, next row, and is showing the contents to Betsy Ross. To Dick's amazement, the package he was carrying contains the sketch for the first American flag. Washington says, the Continental Congress approves your design, ma'am. I've taken the liberty of revising it a little. 13 stars, 13 stripes, red, white, and blue. Betsy Ross promises to try to make a flag just like the drawing. And then she tells him that he's changed the shape of the stars, that they're six-pointed, and that they should be five-pointed. George Washington replies, last picture of the row. Yes, yes, of course, of course. Well, do it your way, ma'am, by all means. And George Washington and Dick leave. First picture, bottom row, some days later, Betsy Ross comes to General Washington.  And he takes her into Washington's headquarters. There, Betsy Ross unwraps the package, and then holds up a big, beautiful flag with 13 stars on a blue field to signify the first 13 states that were the United States when the country was formed. And she says, gentlemen, the American flag. George Washington looks at a project George Washington looks at it proudly and exclaims, Wrong may it waive. Last picture, Dick says proudly, It'll be waving 175 years from now, more glorious than ever, sir. I know it. And George Washington looks at Dick and exclaims, Hmm, what's that good room? But Dick doesn't answer. He's looking far ahead in the future, which he knows so well, and thinking of the flag, which he loves so well. It's a beautiful story. Yes, it certainly is. And it's a beautiful flag. And I know what all the stars are. They still mean things. You're absolutely right. And the stripes mean the first 13 states to become the United States. Oh, I love Dick's adventures because you learn such interesting things about America. Yes, you do. And next week will be some more interesting American history. But now? Oh, look, underneath Dick's adventures, there's Rusty Rally. And this is something I've been worried about because Rusty is in a very dangerous spot. Yes, he could be. He and Patty have gone out on a motorboat, out on the inlet offshore. And the engine stopped, and it's after dark, and some bad old crooks in another boat are coming right to the place where Rusty is. Well, let's read now and see what happens in the story of the smugglers and Rusty Rally. Gallop and Run Till the Road is Dusty. Give us music for his horse and Rusty. In the boat, Rusty says to Patty, I'm pretty dumb all right. There's nothing wrong with the engine. There just isn't any gas left. And he notices that the boat's beginning to drift a little. And he exclaims, Collie, the tide's turned. I better throw the anchor up before we drift out of the inlet to the open sea. And he tosses the anchor overboard and hopes for the best. It's grown darker. Suddenly, Patty hears a boat coming toward them. She hopes it's someone coming after them. Rusty exclaims, yeah, I hear it too. Well, whoever they are, I guess they'll give us a tow if they come near enough to hail. Last picture top row, Patty is just about to yell to the strange boat when Rusty exclaims, hey, stop their engine. Hey, Collie, that's queer. They're running without lights. They keep quiet a minute and see what they're up to.  Clones, lobster pots are close by here. Rusty whispers, Collie, you hear that, Patty? They must be lobster thieves. Then he hears the voice again. All right, Carby. Weng the black light over this way. They've got to get rid of four of these babies before any snoopers come around. Carefully, Rusty watches to see what the thugs are up to, hoping they don't see him. Meanwhile, at a dock not far away, a Coast Guard boat stands by the wharf. One of the men is saying to Mr. Kilgore, oh, look out at the point. Just reported a strange boat in the inlet, Mr. Kilgore. The Treasury agent who had visited Mr. Miles says, come on, let's look it over. Mr. Kilgore gets in the boat and away they go. Last picture of the row, the Coast Guard cruiser approaches the smuggler's boat. Mr. Kilgore yells to him, ahoy, cruiser. This is the Coast Guard. Stand by. We're coming aboard. The smuggler's answer. Come ahead, Coast Guard. We're just looking for a spot to anchor. Yes, and it looks like they got there in time. What is what the smuggler said, wasn't it? Yes. Well, maybe next week we'll find out more about that black light. Oh, it sounds so mysterious, doesn't it? Well, now? Oh, now it's just. Yes, as it is.  Then go over the page past Ripley, and over to page six to Donald Duck. And I'll read that in just a moment. But first here is that man again with something interesting to say. Now here we go again with Puck the Comic Weekly. And on top of page six of the first section, Donald Duckle, good for a chuckle. Say the magic words for the music with me. Squeegeum, squeegeum, squeegee-chicka-chack. Let's have music to fit a quack-quack. Donald is reading the newspaper. Suddenly he exclaimed, wow, wow, time to get busy. What's he going to get busy about? Wait for the next picture. All right, I'll wait. Donald is on the phone, and he's saying, And send it out right away. And the man on the phone replies, Okay, Mr. Duck. What's going to be sent out? Wait till the next picture. All right, I'll wait. Donald looks out the window, and he sees something outside. Ah, here it is. Outside the house is a great big truck, loaded with huge pipes. And Donald exclaims, Okay, man, I'll show you what to left. The man starts to unload it. Last picture top row, Donald tells him, Now start right here with the card one. First picture bottom row, Donald tells him, Okay, the next one right here. A half hour later, the men are through with their work. As Donald pays them their money, the truck driver says, Okay, Mac, but that's a silly place to put a pipe. Donald replies, Come back in January, pal, and see how silly it is then. Some time later, Donald is in his house. He looks out of the window and exclaims, Why, oh boy, look at it come down. Last picture we see Donald's front yard. The snow is coming down curiously, Leading up from Donald's sidewalk to the front door is the huge pipe. While inside the house, Donald with a big grin in his face, looks at the walk, which he won't have to shovel. Oh, to the sidewalk. And now he won't have to walk through the snow to get to his mailbox. Yes, he just walks through the pipe, and of course the snow can't get in there. No, that's right. Wasn't he smart? Yes, this is one time Donald came out ahead. Well now, what'd you say? Bang, bang, Clippity Cluck. Well what does that mean? Roy Rogers. Oh, how silly of me, I should have known. Please read that, because Roy has caught the runaway horse that belongs to his friend, Shelby Walden. Yes, the horse with a map of the gold mine in its shoe. And then those two crooks are after him because they want to get that map too. So please read Roy and see if they do. Very well, over we go to the last page of the first section of Puck the Comic Weekly. And here we go with Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys. Ha-yip-a-yo, now here we go with Roy and Trigger. Ha-yip-a-yo. Ha-yip-a-yo. Roy gallops into Sagebrush Bend into the livery stable where his friend and the girl named Doc Reynolds wait for him. He jumps off Trigger saying, claim jumpers who want the mine map hidden in your horse's shoe are right behind me, Chubby. I'll pry off the hollow shoe so you can grab your map. Then we'll tie the horses outside Doc's workshop. Doc Reynolds tells Roy to hurry because the crooks are in sight. First picture next row, she asks Roy why he's led the crooks to her museum because there's nothing in there but wax dummies of men dressed like cowboys. There'd be no help. Roy ties Trigger outside and tells her with a twinkle in his eye. Don't argue, Doc. Reynolds, come on. Get inside. Not a second too soon because Beaker and Shorty guns in hand, gallop up and rain in outside. Beaker exclaims, there's Roger's horse in the red robe. As they dismount, Beaker draws his gun and heads for the inside of the barn. Shorty asks, hey, how about the gullmine map in your own shoe? That's what we want.  They've taken it out, come on. Last picture of the row, guns in hand. Shorty and Beaker step in the door. They see several men, guns in hand, facing them. A voice suddenly calls. Hands up, you galutes. Me and the boys got you covered. Beaker exclaims, what a trap. Blast him, Shorty. Suddenly, first picture bottom row from behind. Beaker hears Roy's voice. Ruff your guns, gents. Those dummies are harmless, but I'm not. Beaker and Shorty drop their guns. Beaker exclaims, you tricked us. But we ain't through yet, Rogers. And at that moment, Chubby pops up from behind the stand, shun, exclaiming, oh, no.  Beaker exclaims in surprise. Chubby, you alive. Last picture, Roy, leading the two crooks. Their hands tied behind them, mounted on their horses, says to Chubby, you better get your gold strike recorded at the county seat while I herd these hombres to jail, Chubby. And Chubby grins and waves, OK, Roy. And I'm in a finance-dark Reynolds museum with my first polka dash by Gash. When Beaker came into that museum and saw those wax dummies dressed like cowboys, why, he thought they were real men. Yes, and well, he. Yes, that was very, very clever. Yes, it was. Now would you please read Dagwood and Blondie? I certainly will, and here they are on the first page of the second section of Puck the Comic Weekly. So here we go with Dagwood and Blondie. Ram-a-foo, Ram-a-fum, Zim-Zim-Zombie, Conjury Music for Dagwood and Blondie. A delivery boy comes up to Dagwood at the office and says, I'm from the shoe store. Here are Mr. Dithers' new shoes. Dagwood points to Mr. Dithers saying, well, that's him in the office. A moment later, Mr. Dithers has tried on the new shoes and immediately his feet begin to hurt. Mr. Dithers moans, ow, ow, they're too tight. They're killing me. Dagwood clasps his hand so fluently and says, I'll be happy to break them in for you, Mr. Dithers.   I love you as though you were my own son. But the shoes are tight for Dagwood, too. In first picture next row, out in the park, he takes them off and hands them to a hobo whose clothes are all in rags.  The hobo's delighted at the thought of making a dollar so easily. He puts on the shoes, but immediately his feet begin to hurt. And after he takes three steps, he groans. Oh, no, I can't do it. I can't do it. Oh, these shoes must have been made for Cinderella. In next picture, he gives the shoes back to Dagwood. And Dagwood puts them on. And of course, his feet begin to hurt again. Dagwood groans last picture of the row. Oh, I'll take them home and see what I can do with them. First picture bottom row, Dagwood's at home, trying to soften the shoes so they won't hurt Mr. to the street. Blondie says, first we'll soak them in hot, soapy water. And Dagwood hammers away at the shoes, saying, yeah, and then pound them soft with this mallet. Then Dagwood holds ones of the shoes while Alexander pulls at the other end with a pair of ice tongs, saying, yeah, we stretch them with these ice tongs. And Blondie says, I'll take them. I'll pour olive oil on them. And Dagwood says, whoa! And they stretch the shoes. Last picture of the row, Dagwood's on his way to the office wearing the shoes, but now have holes in the toes and holes in the heels.  And Dagwood says cheerfully, ah, and just as soft and comfortable as kid gloves, Mr. Dithers will be so happy. At this moment at the office, the delivery boy dashes in.  Here are the ones you bought. Mr. Dithers, who is sitting there without any shoes on his feet, exclaims, oh, no, no, no. Now, second later, in walks Dagwood holding up the shoes which he's broken in. They're all battered and torn to pieces. And he says, here are your shoes, all broken in like I promised. The delivery boy looks at the shoes and says, ah, that'll cost you $22, Mr. Dithers. Last picture, Dagwood is tied up in the boss's chair. And Mr. Dithers is beating him up with the other pair of new shoes, saying with a devilish grin on his face, this is the best way to break in a pair of shoes. Yes, it just goes to show that very often all of our good intentions just get us into trouble. You know, I guess that's why some people just won't help anybody else. Yes, maybe that's so. But then they call those people selfish. Yes, that's true. Oh, what to do? Yes, these decisions are terrible, aren't they? Yes, they certainly are. Well, I know one thing we won't have any trouble deciding on. Yes, I do too. Prince Valiant, please. And he is on the last page of the comic there, so let's turn over, please. Very well. Prince Valiant and his friends have come to a strange castle. And I'm anxious to see who lives there. Well, here we go on the last page with Prince Valiant in the days of King Arthur. Hecket, breaket, gray mulkin and quints, music romantic for a fair, fair prince. Still on his long journey to Christendom, Prince Valiant and his friends are fortunate, for they arrive at sunset before a fair castle that promises food and shelter for the night. The drawbridge is lowered for them, and last picture, top row, they enter. But ere the gates can close, a lone horseman gallops up, and the rider leaps off his horse and runs swiftly into the castle, saying nothing to Valiant or his friends. After their horses have been stable, Valiant and his friends are taken in the castle too, and as they are dusty from their ride, first picture, next row, towels, and a basin of scented water are brought, and they refresh themselves. Then, after a long wait, the Lord of the castle receives them. If he's surprised at the ball-headed appearance of his guests, he's too courteous to show it. As Valiant and his friends stand before him, the Lord tells them, first picture, bottom row, noble sirs, I am honored to have you accept my hospitality this night, but at dawn you must leave, for I have just received warning that my enemies are marching to attack. Next morning at dawn, they thank their host and mount, but the departure is delayed, but suddenly, last picture, the meadow beyond the gate of the castle is swarming with armed men, and more are arriving every minute. The attack has come. Fight the battle. Yes, and if everyone in the castle is being attacked, it means val too. Yes, thank Valiant. Yes, just shows what easy will get you. Now don't worry, I'm sure Prince Valiant will be a big help in defeating the enemy. Oh, I'm sure too, because he's a hero. Yes, he is. Well, now that's all the time I have, but before I go, here's that fellow with some more interesting information. Well, honey, and all your boys and girls, I've got to go now. All right, Mr. Comic Bigly Man, but I'll be waiting for you next week.  Be sure to meet me with our little friend Miss Honey next week when I read Puck the Comic Weekly. For I'm the Comic Weekly Man, the Jolly Comic Weekly Man. I'll be back to read the funnies to you happy boys and honeys. Don't forget, boys and girls, see you all next week. Your friend the Comic Weekly Man, the Jolly Comic Weekly Man.


I'd like to take a minute to explain the background in the lecture series and then I'll hand it off to UCAR President Tony Busilaki to introduce our lecturer. Dr. Walter Orr Roberts was a visionary and a trailblazer. In 1940, he set up the High Altitude Observatory on the Continental Divide at Climax, Colorado, which evolved over the years from a one-man operation to a research division of NCAR. In 1960, the National Science Foundation asked Dr. Roberts to be the director of the newly formed National Center for Atmospheric Research, which he headed until 1968. He simultaneously held the UCAR presidency from its inception in 1960 until 1973. Dr. Roberts was influential in establishing Boulder's space and rocket science communities that later spawned the University of Colorado's Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics and Ball Brothers Research Corporation, which is now Ball Aerospace Systems Division. The Walter Orr Roberts Distinguished Lecture was established in 1998 and it's supported by private donations, including donations of members of Dr. Roberts's family. And it serves as part of NCAR's and UCAR's public outreach to the broader community. Since that time, we have hosted 12 distinguished lecturers, most recently, Katherine Hayhoe, Richard Alley, Kerry Emanuel, and Tracy Holloway. Now I'll pass the screen, if you will, onto UCAR President Tony Busilaki to introduce this year's Distinguished Lecturer. Thank you, Tiffany, and good morning, good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to welcome you to today's Walter Orr Roberts lecture and also like to add my thanks to the Roberts family for their support of this series. I mean, it really is a great personal and professional privilege to introduce today's Walter Orr Roberts Lecturer, Professor Ravi Shankara from Colorado State University. Ravi is a university distinguished professor in the departments of chemistry and atmospheric science at CSU. And prior to that, he had a long distinguished career at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratories in Boulder within the Chemical Sciences Division and in his previous life known as the Eronomy Lab. Ravi is a member of the United States National Academies of Science, a foreign member of the Royal Society of London, a fellow of the American Geophysical Union, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, as well as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Presently, Ravi chairs the Board of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate for the National Academies and the Science Advisory Panel for Climate Clean Air Coalition for UNEP. Ravi's interest has a world-renowned recognition, recognized for his expertise in atmospheric chemistry as it pertains to ozone depletion, climate change, air quality. I had the privilege of working with Ravi within the World Climate Research Program and it really is a distinct pleasure to now introduce today's speaker, Professor Ravi Shankara. Ravi, over to you, please. For some reason, I cannot seem to turn on my video, okay, there it says, perfect. Thank you, Tony, for those very kind words. It's really greatly appreciated. It's really an honor to give this lecture. I didn't know Walter Roberts, but I did know his trail, which I could see from a house in Boulder and walked on it many times, but I knew his reputation. And also it's humbling to be given this lecture, knowing people like Warren Washington, Susan Solomon, Kerry Emanuel, Jim Hansen, just to name a few who are previous speakers. It's really humbling. Thank you. As Tony noted, I spent roughly 30 years in NOAA and I'm going to start sharing my screen if I could. We tried this all out before, but it just doesn't want to work for me. Can you all see the screen now? Yes, that's perfect. Okay, thank you. Technology, technology. So anyway, I spent 30 years at NOAA and I've been at Colorado State University and I should acknowledge the contributions of the funding from NOAA, Colorado State, and also NASA. If NASA is listening, you got the best bargain for your grants. Okay, before I go further, I just want to take a second to note the passing of Mario Molina, a dear friend and colleague and an absolutely amazing scientist who many of us have known for a long time. I've known him for more than 40 years. He passed away last week and he's a real shocker for all of us. Okay, now turning to the topic at hand, all of you know that climate change is an existential threat, at least many of you assume that you know it. The reason it is an existential threat is because climate is being changed by human activities primarily through the emission of greenhouse gases. What this picture on the left shows is the way the concentrations of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide and methane, which is on this scale, were as a function of the last 2,000 years. And as you can see, it was pretty constant and then it started going up with human activities. And the one shown here is for CO2 over the last 50, 60 years, the famous Keeling curve with a shout out to NOAA, with this enormous amount of work in making this possible, clearly CO2 is going up and up and we have already passed 400 parts per million, we are approaching not too far from being about twice what it was in the coming decades. But less known but important is the human activities are also creating aerosol particles. Aerosols are little particles suspended in air and they are also responsible for various things in the earth's atmosphere. So just to get you familiarize yourself to aerosols, incidentally we call it particulate matter when it comes to health and aerosols when we come to climate change. It actually has a role in both human health and climate change. These are very small particles. If you were to pull out one of your hair, I can't afford to do it, I don't have much. But if you did, you could see the dimension of your hair compared to the size of those particles. These are very, very tiny particles. And these particles, depending on their size, when you breathe it, it goes into your lungs and the size determines how far, how deep it gets into your lungs and it has very bad health effects. I'll show you in a few minutes. In addition, these same particles also affect climate change and actually in a way these particles have lessened climate change over the last few decades from going back. Now the key difference between greenhouse gases and aerosols is something we really need to note. The greenhouse gases in general are long lived in the atmosphere. If you put them there, they stay there for a while. While aerosols live for a very short time, maybe a couple of weeks. Because they're long lived, they accumulate in the atmosphere, the greenhouse gases. But because the aerosols go away, they do not accumulate in the atmosphere. The greenhouse gases absorb outgoing infrared radiation that is like a blanket that prevent heat from escaping. While the aerosols actually affect the incoming solar radiation, sunlight, the absorbent scattered incoming light. Greenhouse gases generally do not directly influence health. But aerosols do. Of course, greenhouse gases have indirect effects. When you change climate, it can affect health. What I'm going to talk about here mostly is about direct health effects. And also you can kind of think of this as I'm going to use this term called premature deaths. It's a proxy for health effects. There are other things that happen in addition to death that are important. At this point, I should take a second to kind of explain the big difference of this lifetime. Think of it the following way. Because Peter and Paul both had the same salary, they have a bank account, and except Peter doesn't spend his money at all. He saves it a lot, and the Paul on the other hand keeps spending a lot of it. So you can imagine the bank balance of Peter is going to be much larger than that of Paul. And what matters is if you're thinking about the effect it has, Peter will have more in the bank than Paul, and that actually has an effect on climate and various things. So that's the big difference between greenhouse gases and aerosols. Greenhouse gases are like Peter, aerosols are like Paul. Before I go further, I just want to acknowledge that I've been blessed with working with amazing scientists throughout my career. The talks I'm giving today are really based on the work of Daniel Murphy, who is at NOAA in what is now called Chemical Sciences Laboratory. He's an amazing scientist, and also Liji David at Colorado State University, who did most of the work on the air quality. Along with my colleague at Atmospheric Sciences, Jeff Pierce, and Chandra Venkatraman from IIT Bombay in India, along with Jack Kudros and a few others who are very helpful. The kind of stuff I'm talking about are actually in four papers that are listed below. Just a request, one of the papers that Ravishankar et al. is in press, so please don't blog about it. There's an embargo on the paper for a couple more weeks. The reason I'm showing this is because these are the building blocks, but I don't want to spend time on the building blocks. I want to tell you a story. I want to paint you a picture. I want to show you the little duck there rather than the individual bricks. So let's get started. Just so that we're all on the same page, oh, also I meant to tell you, I know there are a lot of experts at Atmospheric Sciences listening to this. My apologies up front, because I'm going to simplify things, and I might not put all the caveats I need to. So please bear with me. You all know what greenhouse effect is, hopefully. Essentially, this is the greenhouse. In the Earth's atmosphere, the greenhouse effect is formed by the greenhouse gases. That's why they're called greenhouse gases represented by these blue dots on the left. So when the sunlight comes in and warms the Earth's surface, the heat would be escaping to space, but these blue dots, the greenhouse gases, prevent some of that escaping and then essentially leads to the warming. Of course, eventually the heat does escape, but leaves the Earth warmer. So that's the greenhouse effect. Now, that is something that we are known, so the first thing you should know is the greenhouse effect essentially warms the Earth, the planet. On the other hand, aerosols have a different effect, as I mentioned. They scatter and absorb incoming solar radiation. So they prevent light from getting down to the Earth, so that kind of cools in a way. But also they do one other amazing thing, and that is they change the properties of clouds in many ways. Therefore, the clouds are the things that you see are bright out there, and that eventually also scatter, reduce the amount of light that can get to the surface. So the overall effect of aerosols is to cool the Earth's planet. So it is this combination of warming and cooling that we're interested in. So anthropogenic aerosols have lessened the global warming, that's the key point. So to put it very simply, here is the greenhouse gases warming, aerosols cooling, and what the Earth feels is the net effect. I just wanted to point out all these quantities I'm talking about are under human control. And the greenhouse gas influence includes that caused by land use change, and also there are some other things. And the aerosols effect also, as I said, includes direct and indirect effects. The key message I want to get across is aerosols have actually masked the full impact of greenhouse gases. In other words, they kind of helped climate change or reduce the climate change. Okay. So let's ask a question.  I'm not going to do it by individual people, but we're going to do it by regions. Okay. So you can kind of think of it as to what this world is like. We're going to divide this world into nine regions. Those that are developed countries, those that are developing countries, those that are in transition, et cetera, and also the development patterns having similar patterns, development and economics, et cetera. So here's a picture of what I call the climate forcing, which really is for those who are fishing out, this is the radiative forcing in watts per meter square on the left axis. Please look at the bottom figure. What that shows is the contribution of the radiative forcing from nine regions of the world. North America, Western Europe, China, Russia and Eastern Europe, Pacific, Middle East and the Africa, Latin America, other Asia and Indian subcontinent. As you can see, North America, which is essentially US and Canada, are contributing more to greenhouse forcing than any others. So as Western Europe, they started long further back and this is what it looks like as a contribution. But along with the greenhouse gases, if you include the contribution of aerosol, the pattern looks different. Look at the top picture. Essentially until about 1960, the net contribution was not all that large and North America kind of broke out in the late 1960s to early 1970s, followed by Western Europe and China is barely breaking out and as you can see India still hasn't in the subcontinent. There are a couple of key reasons for this. The reason is that the aerosols kind of offset the forcing by the greenhouse gases such as CO2, but also just as important is that you cannot keep offsetting the effect of greenhouse gases. You have to add more and more and more aerosols if you have to do this and at some point you can't do it. So that's what those combination of reasons. So this accumulation in the atmosphere of the greenhouse gases and the effect of the aerosols is the cause of this pattern of behavior. I'm going to just do this a little bit. So this is same area to force in for the globe as a function of fear. What matters is not what's happening today but actually what has happened over time. So if you remember your high school calculus, the integration is the area under the curve. So essentially what we're doing is calculating the total amount of energy that has been retained or prevented from going out from the Earth's atmosphere. Actually a big chunk of it goes away in terms of radiating at a slightly higher temperature. So this is what we call a cumulative radiative forcing and that is the equation. I'm sorry for the equation. But think of it again as this bank account as I told you. What's in this bank depends on what's coming from various sources. In this particular case I'm noting greenhouse gases offsetting the effect of aerosols and also land use and land cover changes. And then there is radiation going out and essentially so this is what's retained. So this is a very important way of thinking about it, very simple way of thinking about it. How much energy is retained in the Earth's atmosphere. There are also a couple of other reasons for doing it. You can relate these things to some key things in the climate equations and you can calculate the delta T if you know the climate sensitivity factor but that's not the key point though. I just want to show this slide to tell you there's real physics behind it. But before I can tell you what this means, I want to just show you a few numbers of the magnitude of this thing. So just the total amount of energy, cumulative radiative forcing, that's the additional energy retained by the Earth. Between 1907 and 2020, that's the area under the curve is approximately three yotta jewels. This is a unit that you probably haven't heard of. One yotta jewel is like one times 10 to the 24 jewels. For chemists it is roughly like Avogadro's number and so you can actually see it's like a trillion trillion jewels of energy. It's a lot of energy. So the total energy from the Sun we receive at Earth's surface every year is roughly two and a half yotta jewels. So over the last 110 years because of the greenhouse gases, essentially what has happened is only about one percent of the energy. Just to compare that with something else we know, the total amount of energy consumed on Earth in one year, the electrical energy is 0.0006 yotta jewels, which is roughly 0.02 percent of what comes from the Sun. Okay, with this background, let's do the blame game if you want to call it or the credit game, what are the contributions of different regions and different countries? So what is plotted here is this cumulative radiative forcing and to nine regions, North America, Western Europe, Russia and Eastern Europe, China, Indian subcontinent, other Asia, Middle East Asia, Latin America and the Pacific, there are a whole bunch of different bars. Let's look at the dark areas here. What these are are the contributions to date from the emissions, assuming nothing else is added after today. We actually stopped it in 2017, but it's today for all practical purposes. But even if you stop it today, nothing else you don't emit it. By 2100, this is the contribution. This is the legacy of these emissions is that it goes so far up. This is something that Susan Solomon in a PNAS paper pointed out a few years ago. And if you include the land cover, land use land cover, the picture changes somewhat and those are shown here. So you can see it for all these different countries that you can see today Indian subcontinent and even China haven't contributed as much as North America or Europe. Europe actually did almost all the land cover land use land cover a long time ago. So they don't get much in here. So you can see the pattern here. So the current contributions include the past emissions, the legacy of it and the developing countries have contributed minimally to climate change to date. And a large fraction of the greenhouse gas offset for aerosols does the particulate matter pollution is what's causing part of this. You can actually do it even simpler. Let's divide the world into the haves and the have nots, the OECD countries which are essentially the developing countries, developed countries, which is North America and Western Europe for all practical purposes. And then there are economies in transition, the countries that were communist countries that are transitioning their economies. And then there are of course the rest of the world. If you look at the contribution, you'll see that the developed countries have contributed roughly the same amount as the rest of the world. Okay. And if you then do it per capita or per billion people, this is the contribution of OECD countries compared to the rest of the world. So the bottom line message is the developed countries have contributed more to climate change to date and up to 2100 than the rest of the world. Okay. Of course, they have in the process gained a lot of wealth and a lot of other things that go with it, but that's a different issue. Okay. Now I have to show this just for completeness. So looking ahead, what could happen? And this is a kind of couple of scenarios. Again, the same kind of numbers except the scale has changed. This is the additional contribution shown here in the hatched area. For two different scenarios, one is called RCP 8.5, which is essentially business as usual. The other one is RCP 2.6, which is roughly, please don't argue with me, is roughly Paris Accord. So even if you did all things you could do, it's still going to get worse by 2100. Again, even in this scenario, the thing you notice is the largest contributions are from Canada, Western Europe, and China gets to be a big player if you go through RCP 8.5. Subcontinent is still kind of small and you can see the contributions of others. I know that what I've showed you is this energy thing that is not necessarily directly translated into the consequences of climate change. Big things such as sea level rise are related to exactly what I've showed you. But there could be other things that are much more different, shifts in precipitation and things of that nature that are much more complex. So this does not capture the entire impact of climate change. It's a way of kind of measuring roughly what are the contributions to climate change, especially the globally average temperature change and also for things such as sea level rise, etc. So the bottom line, what I've told you is it's not just carbon dioxide. Climate change contribution of different countries depend on the combination of greenhouse gas emissions, aerosols emissions, and land use and land cover changes. Climate impact of aerosols and greenhouse gases are not exactly the same. There are issues, some things we could talk about later maybe. But please, please do not forget the legacy of emissions. What we have done in the past is going to affect us today. And what we are doing today is going to affect what's going to happen in the future. In the long run, with a continued CO2 emission, you just cannot make up, offset the CO2 emissions by keeping freezing the aerosol pollution, you just, you can't do it. That's an interesting point. Okay, now let me just turn to the other face of these aerosols. As I told you, they also affect human health. And now I'm going to pretty much focus on the human health as relate to the country. I know a little bit about India, where I was born and lived for almost 20 years. So let me go into that issue. Why is this PAM, this particulate matter bad for health? It does lots of bad things. This is not my expertise, I should just tell you up front. And if you inhale it, it affects all sorts of body functions. This is a picture I took from my colleagues, John Vokunsen, Jennifer Peale at CSU. Jennifer is an epidemiologist. And John Vokunsen is a health kind of environmental engineer. And this essentially summarizes, there are four major impacts of this. It affects, it does things like lung cancer, strokes, heart disease and COPD. So that's some of the four regions to think about. Now, of course, when you think of India, you think of this iconic picture. This is a picture of Taj Mahal. It is beautiful, isn't it? And look at how beautiful it looks in nice blue skies and sunlight. And this is not the way it looks like when most mortals like us go and take a picture. This is what it looks like. This is really a picture I took a few years ago. And the reason it looks like this is it's polluting. You can feel, smell, taste, breathe the pollution. And that's how the pollution levels are in many parts of India. So this has helped climate, but let's see what it does to the health. So if you want to think about it, let's look at a satellite's view of what it looks like for various countries. This is the United States on the left, China on the right. This is from Mizer. And this is India. This is what the satellite sees. Just for your reference, you can all take a deep breath. Most of you heard in Colorado, today you're breathing roughly about two and a half micrograms per cubic meter of aerosols, PM 2.5. At the same time, people in Delhi, people in Bangalore where I come from are breathing 10 times worse here, about 25. In Delhi, it's like 85 micrograms. In a city about 100 miles from Delhi called Featherabad, it is about 100 times worse than in Denver or Colorado. This is the kind of air people are breathing. Now let's see how it looks in other parts of the world. It was like bad in parts of America, too. This is a picture I took from this beautiful study from Meng et al. There is Landl, Martin, Michael Brower, Conclair, et cetera, which came out last year. It just shows you the amount of PM 2.5 over America, the United States, from 1985 to 2015. Indeed, North America has cleaned up its air, as you can see. It's really much cleaner. But over India, you can see it. This is the Indo-Gangetic Plain. What you see here is really pollution. This is clouds. These are the beautiful snow-covered mountains of Himalayas, but this is real. This is what's happening. So let's examine this a little bit more carefully. So what we have done is to take the satellite-derived information and convert this to what is at the surface where people actually breathe it. There are lots of little ways to do this. There are things you do when we use something called a GEOSCAM model that can relate measured satellite information to surface PM 2.5. That's what really matters. That's what people are breathing. What you can see, this color scale is very deceptive. It goes from about 0 to 200. And 100 looks greenish. It doesn't mean it's good. It's bad. It has to be deep blue for it to be okay. And India sees deep blue pretty much during the monsoon season. And of course, this interganetic plane is off-chart, so to speak. So as you can see, most of this part of India is based in pollution almost all year round. So if you could analyze this information, what you see is that there are various contributors to this. And this is, we divided India again into a few different regions and looked at where it looks. Clearly interganetic plane is the biggest and followed by central India and not too far behind the South India. And the cleanest part, of course, is the northern India with the mountains, etc. Okay. There are two key things I want you to note. The anthropogenic aerosols still dominate over India. It's not just dust. And dust is not just natural dust. It's really suspended dust. It's actually something under human control. Organic aerosols are important, but they are not the dominant part of the aerosols over India based on the emission inventory we have today. Okay. So what does this do for health? So we can actually calculate how many people, what is the premature mortality due to this level of pollution over India? And what we calculate for the few different causes, heart attacks, stroke, COPD and lung cancer in the total is shown for all the different parts of India. Also, these scales are not the same. So it's going to deceptive this. This is about 5,000. This is 3,000 up here. It's only 500. Okay. So when you add them all up, this is what it looks like. And if you just sum them all up, we calculated that roughly 1.4 million premature mortality risk due to PM 2.5 exposure in India. And this is roughly comparable to what Kone et al. got in 2017. And there's also global burden of disease report. This is roughly comparable. I also meant to tell you there's a lot of uncertainties in these calculations. So don't take these numbers like really hard numbers, but it gives you qualitatively what happens. I mean, compared to America, this is like factors of 5 to 10 higher. Okay. Now, if you just look again at the different regions of India, what it looks like. This is a picture of the PM 2.5 annual average. And also the population in these areas. The interesting thing you notice right away is not only is the pollution high in the inorganic plane, so is the population. That means a lot more people breathing a lot more bad air, which shows up right here in the bottom figure. Okay. But then you can look at all these things and then calculate what fraction is, et cetera. So there are a couple of key messages that comes out from this.  You have to reduce it by a lot before you start getting huge gains. The economic costs of these are not just in terms of premature mortality, there are a lot of other things that happen. And also, just like this mentioned, this latency in all these things, it's just the long-term effects are not kind of included, it's hard to imagine or calculate. If you can put a picture of all the people who die prematurely, it would really show you the threat. I know when you start looking that kind of cracks and figures, we forget there are people behind those things. And mortality is not the only impact as I told you. So this is a pretty big issue in India. So if you were to then very quickly ask yourself, where is it and what does it look like in India? Honestly, once you normalize it for the population, the mortality is not all that different across India. This is kind of North India being almost the lowest, about roughly 700 people per million compared to maybe about 920 or something for IGP. But they're all roughly the same. As I said, the US would be way down here somewhere. Now, this is too complicated. So I just want to tell you, it's not just that people in one region are being affected by what's happening in that region. It actually gets transported, and as you can see in the picture before, it really goes from place to place. So the simplest message I want to get across very quickly here is, if you want to look at the contribution of the endogenetic plane emissions on the premature mortality, it's roughly about 420,000 people per year, about 0.4 million. But the same emissions affect roughly another 100,000 people elsewhere, away from endogenetic plane. Similar things happen from emissions in central India and a few other parts of India. So it's an issue that is coming up more and more, that the locals cannot necessarily control their own air quality. It actually is determined by what happens around us, and transportation, transport of this pollution is not a negligible problem. So if India were to plan something, it really should be planning a pan-India regulatory issue. Now, I was actually raised in a village for 10 years, and it has always demanded me that India is mostly what we call a non-urban country, and we usually associate pollution with urban regions. In fact, we usually call it urban air pollution. And it's also incidentally all outdoor air pollution I talked about so far. But let's ask ourselves, how does it change if you go from urban to non-urban regions? The reason I'm calling it non-urban is there are some interesting differences in the way populations are distributed in developed countries versus India. And the way we did this is to look at the night light, satellite data, and classified areas according to urban and non-urban regions. And then we can compare that with the census data from India, and it roughly agrees. It actually agrees quite well our classification. So we are parsed India now, not just into different regions, but between urban and non-urban regions. Okay? Then when you look at that and ask yourself, what is the pollution level in these things, you see an interesting picture. This is the paper that's going to come out in PNAS shortly, and this is the one I don't want you to blog about or share. As I said, there is an embargo. The top picture, this picture here, incidentally, this is essentially a satellite derived PM concentration, and it's weighted by exposure. In other words, you want to make sure that you count aerosols where people are, not where people aren't. Okay? So you kind of count for that. And then let's look at this picture here. For all of India, if you look at it, the population, a large population in the non-urban region is seeing these very high levels. Incidentally, it goes from zero to 225 micrograms per cubic meter. This is the number of millions of people. Also, I should tell you, this line here is the WHO standard for allowed PM2.5 exposure, and India standard is up here. The thing you notice is, the majority of the people are not, are well about the India standards, almost everybody is about WHO standards. But this is not just urban people who are feeling it. Look at this, this is the non-urban people who are feeling this large amount. Yes, what you see in the newspaper is this green line that goes way up here in the urban regions. But there's a lot of people in this region with this kind of pollution level. Then you can separate them out into the nine regions I talked about, six regions. And indeed, Indo-Gangetic Plain is what is making this big bump here. The Indo-Gangetic Plain has two things. It has major pollution, and the population in the Indo-Gangetic Plain is roughly 400 million. That's a big chunk of India. But so is Central India and Eastern India. Only when you get to Western India and South India do you see a non-negligible part meeting India's own standards. But even here, there's a very big chunk that do not meet Indian standards. So the bottom line message is, this is not just an urban problem. This is just the outdoor air pollution. Then if you start factoring in indoor air pollution, which we haven't done, I would argue that it's going to be much different. In fact, it'll be the same thing that the non-urban people are breathing just as much bad air as the urban people. And to put this again in quantitative terms, I'm comparing the annual mortality per million for the different regions between urban and non-urban. As you can see, to first approximation, they're almost all the same in all the regions. And it doesn't matter where you are in India, and that's what's happened. So again, you can just summarize this by looking at the mortality in millions, fraction, or annual mortality. As you can see, this is, if you look at per million people, urban and non-urban people in India are both breathing bad air just about equally and have the same effect. And just thing I want to just point out, it's not that all this bad air is coming from non-urban areas into non-urban areas. Non-urban areas are also creating their own pollution also. This is from an emission inventory by various sectors. And this is something you just want to note. But before I end, I want to just point out this is a movie we have seen before. I don't know if any of you can guess what the picture on the left here is. This was actually the one here. And this you can guess because this is Tithal Tower. And those of you who know about India can guess, this is India. This is the India Gate in Delhi. This was Danora, Pennsylvania in 1948. This is London in 1952. This is New Delhi, can't remember a year or two ago. And this is Paris a few years ago. This is actually interesting. The countries like America and Europe had very bad air pollution, but they have actually cleaned it up. That is one of the reasons why the climate contribution started going up from these countries. Air pollution is not new. But we learned a lot of lessons in cleaning this up. And it'll be really wonderful to apply those lessons to the countries where things are going bad. But of course, you need to include the local knowledge to make it usable. And also, I want to note, air quality problem is not only in developed countries. There's air quality problems in developed countries also, even now. So the key message is, air quality is not something you solve, but you manage. You have to learn to evolve, learn, manage, and be accountable as we go forward. So let me just kind of finish up with this slide again. I told you about the climate effect of this. The rich people, rich countries have contributed more per capita to climate change, to date, and in the future than the poor countries the rest of the world combined. And that's the point I made earlier. The health burden, on the other hand, is much more, much worse in countries like India. And here I show you the same health burden from PM 2.5 took from OECD report from 2020. Its factors are three to five, depending on the countries, less than in this country. So that's my tongue-in-cheek title for my talk. Are the people in developing countries paying with their lives to make climate better for everybody? With that, let me just summarize the key points I want to make is that developed countries have contributed more to climate change, to date, than developing countries. PM 2.5 pollution in developing countries have reduced climate change, but those countries are paying a price for it in bad health. Continued bad health is not an option in the long run. Legacy is important. It's important for so many things, and it's important for climate change, and also for equality. Contribution to future is avoidable, or the contribution to the past, we don't know what to do with. We're stuck with it. There are implications to what I talked about for other things, going forward for developing countries with cleaner air without greenhouse gas emissions. And also about geoengineering and things of that nature, especially solar energy management. I didn't talk about it, but I just wanted to mention that up there. With that, I really thank you for your listening. I assume there's somebody listening. I have no idea. But also thank you to UCAR and NCAR for this opportunity to give the Roberts lecture. With that, I stop. Paul, should I stop sharing my screen at this point? Yeah, I think so, yeah, that's good. So thank you, Raleigh. Thanks so much. One of the phrases that Walt Roberts is famous for coining is science and support of society. And you really epitomize that in your lecture today, and thank you for that.  And you really brought it home to what the impact is on the individual and the populations in developing countries. And so I really appreciate you doing that. And then also you demonstrated for us today that, you know, air quality has been managed. Can be managed. And by extrapolation, that can also be applied to the greenhouse gas problem as well. And so, you know, I think you demonstrated as severe as a problem is that there is optimism to be found if we have the will around the world to manage it. We have a series of comments and questions of coming in for those that are watching the livestream. Please scroll down and submit your questions to Ravi. And I'm going to turn it over to Ravi to basically take them as they come in. Ravi, over to you if you can see them. One second, please, because I'm not able to get rid of my screen sharing. If not, I can read them for you. OK. Oh, I see. I can just look at my other screen and OK. Thank you. Thank you for the first question. I'm not sure what LMICs are, but yes, there are other things. Also, we have started accounting for things like that, including diabetes in more recent papers. Thank you. That's the first question. But Steven Schwander, I think that's the done. Yes, the air pollution does shift the monsoon. There is some things like that that are really important. And I mentioned what I showed you is kind of important for kind of global effects. And there are other intricate effects. Also, there are issues about black carbon heating versus cooling and the whole host of issues. The aerosol precipitation issues are very big one. And yes, the shift in monsoons, even by a few degrees, could have a huge impact on countries like India. Thank you for pointing that out. Yes, say North America cleaned the air pollution. Yes, it actually cleaned the air pollution in a couple of ways. The regulations really did help. The U.S. has greatly reduced SO2 emissions and to some extent some NOx emissions. So that 35, the sulfate emission reduction is a very important issue. Yes, America also shifted production to elsewhere. But you know, the manufacturing in the U.S. has now gone down. It has been automated, so more and more. So in terms of production, the cleaning up was very important. Again, as Tony emphasized again, we really can't clean up our air. So that is something to think about. Thank you. Thank you for the next comment. I don't think... Oh, Shukla, thank you for listening. Oh, great. Shukla just gave me a ground-based verification of, you know, he has a village in the Gangetic plain near Kanpur, and he is telling me the pollution there is pretty bad. And he got a better idea of why it is. Thank you, Shukla. Incidentally, he does a great amount of wonderful work there in supporting the college, if anybody is interested. Any other questions? So probably, you know, in the people that are watching, we have a wide range of people from, you know, early career, mid-career, late-career, just people within the community, you know, sincerely interested in our science. For the early-career scientists, you know, any advice to the early-career scientists in terms of, you know, career trajectories and what you see as the emerging, pressing problems from your perspective. Thank you, Tony. That's another way of, Tony, saying, I'm an old man. Yes, which I am. Me too. Yeah, my life, my trajectory was kind of partly accidental and partly good luck. I got into atmospheric chemistry because I heard Sherry Rowland's talk. That was the first time I saw a picture of Maurya Molina, actually. And then I had the fortunate chance to work in amazing places like George Tech and NOAA and now at CSU and having amazing scientists, colleagues. The thing that I found was what I would say is I kind of have followed what I would call the pastures quadrant in science. That is use-inspired research. It is not necessarily user-inspired, it's use-inspired research, which essentially runs the gambit of doing the very fundamental things like doing laboratory studies and various things like that to kind of trying to take that information to a usable form and make it usable by the society and policymakers, et cetera. There's an enormous amount of joy in doing that, the last part. And also one thing I'll tell you, if I were to do my career all over again, I would take some key social science classes. It's so important to have social sciences in our work because if you do socially relevant work, we really need to understand social sciences and they should be coming in at the beginning of research projects. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, Ravi. And the last point is, you know, my experiences like over the last 10 years, we've seen kind of a shift in the students being much more socially conscious and actually doing dual group degrees, taking courses in social science.  It's not basic research onto itself, it's not applied research onto itself. It's all the way and it's not either or. And we now have some more questions coming in, so I'll turn it back over to you. The residential contribution in non-urban areas are higher because the population there is higher. India is still mostly an urban region. I just showed you the raw total amount of emissions. Is India planning to shift renewable energy? I hope so. Yes, at the same time, they did build some coal burning power plants in the eastern part of India. And there's also a huge power plant being built on the border with Bangladesh. There's a whole issue of, you know, just because you move the power plant across a border doesn't mean the emissions stop there. Yeah, that's a big issue. Yes. Does the use of renewable energy. It is a big, in my opinion, humble opinion, I'm not an expert in this. Renewable energy has a huge role in cleaning up North America. Cleaning up North America for the invisible CO2 pollution. That is continuing to, yes, it's not going up as much, but it's still going up. And it's not, yes, it may be this year the emissions have gone down a little bit. But you know the thing that you may not realize, actually, I had a slide on it. Even if you were to just kind of stop emitting today, our climate change is not going to go away. In fact, it's going to get worse for the first decade or so before it even stabilizes. There's the forcing and the change itself is going to go on for a long time. So yes, yes, there are lots of interesting reports about COVID and clean air. In fact, I have two of those papers on my desk for some other general I'm dealing with. India has seen it and lots of other areas have seen it. Again, it just shows you that indeed if you turn off air pollution, the things that make air pollution, air pollution goes away. There's a quick return. It really does help and help now. Yeah, so yes, what I would call this COVID has created a perturbation experiment for us. It's an unexpected perturbation which has shown what can happen. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know what to say. Yes, I'm reading this question, the global per person contribution to warming. It resonates like a privilege issue, benefits for some are at the cost of many others. I don't know if I look at it quite that way. I think I would look at it maybe more like a responsibility issue of taking responsibility for things that we have done in the past. There are so many other social issues like that. So I don't know, maybe I'll think of it more as a responsibility issue. Thank you for pointing that out. Yes, I actually had a slide. I kind of skipped because of time. How much of the pollution in India is coming from other countries? It's not zero, but it's not huge. And it also depends on which part of India you are in. The northwestern part of India does get a significant amount of pollution from elsewhere. And similarly, India transports a lot of pollution to Bangladesh. If I'm not into policy, but I would like to point out that Bangladesh is surrounded on three sites by India. And even the eastern part of India gets most of its pollution from the rest of India. Thank you. Oh, thank you. I don't know what else. I think this whole thing with COVID is a great opportunity for us to increase our knowledge and transmit that knowledge about the aerosols and the role in at least air quality.  But yeah, I need to think about it. The aerosols and the transmission and etc. due to the issue of COVID has really heightened people's people are much more receptive to this information. And I think we should take advantage of that. Thank you. Can carbon capture and I haven't seen very practical ways of capturing CO2. But if somebody were to come up with capturing CO2 and storing it, you know, more power to them. But you know, the thing that we have to remember is if you once you already emit CO2 into the atmosphere for you to process all the air that is in the atmosphere back through some processing plant, it takes a lot of energy. I once calculated this for a totally different thing. How much air is processed through all the thermal power plants? Okay, that takes roughly 10,000 years. Okay, I think those are the questions so far. All right, all right, Robbie, we're at seven minutes past the bottom of the hour. Let me just thank you once again for a very stimulating talk. You really was thought provoking in a very positive sense, again, bringing it home to us as what individuals are and really appreciate your leadership on this particular topic. And as I said before, your talk really did epitomize science in support of society. And I'd like to once again in closing, thank everybody for watching this morning and afternoon, the Roberts family for their support, Tiffany Formant and UCAR Center for Scientific Education. And again, please join me in a virtual applause to Robbie. And Robbie, I do look forward to thanking you personally on the other side of COVID. So thank you once again. Thank you very much. Bye, y'all.