 I wanted, first of all, even before I start giving you another programmatic sort of a talk before we get into the real science. First of all, thank you, Inseek, for the wonderful introduction that, for the wonderful introduction he gave with the story of how this workshop came about. And it's important to remember this as part of the entire scene of the Kedel climate variability research. And then, of course, before I run into time crunch to think a few of the people who are extremely instrumental in putting this together, beginning with Inseek, going to the local organization committee with Fred and particularly Anna, on top of also of organizing the activities of the Clive activities on that subject, also put together this workshop. And without these kinds of helps, we would not be at this wonderful place and the ability to get the science together and inspire future activities. Also, of course, to thank the ICTP for providing this place. I think one of the best places to organize a meeting of this kind from previous experience. So it was a real joy to know that this place would be able to host this kind of a meeting. So without much further ado, I'd like to tell you an additional story about how Clive got into this interesting activity and lay out some ideas of what we are expecting to come out from this workshop. Sorry, I also would like to thank the speakers who agreed so nicely to come out here and to give their view of the Kedel variability and of course to all the audience here for making the trip and coming. And so sorry for the people who could not, we could not host here. Hopefully they are watching us now on the special electronic facilities that were provided by the organizers here. So thanks everybody. The Kedel variability is a long interest of the community, of the research community. And I can remember workshops of all kinds and symposia of all kinds that were happening starting in the 1980s, 1990s with interest in the Kedel variability. This has been going on for a long time. So the question is what are we doing here right now? So before that I wanted to say what do we mean by the Kedel variability? Why are we so interested in that? And what are the impacts on people's lives? And this is just a short list of examples of what we encountered in the last 50 years or so in terms of changes that have a long time scale that cause climate shifts or climate variability depending on how you are looking at it. And we'll have some more about whether we are talking about the same thing when we are saying shift and when we are saying variability or not. The Sahel droughts, the big change in the Sahel that happened in the 1970s, which was a devastating event for sub-Saharan Africa. And we still don't completely understand exactly how this thing happened and whether anthropogenic influences were involved or whether it was a natural variability of the sort we can expect more in the future. Tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic. Researchers already in the 1980s have pointed out big Decadal changes that occur in frequency of storms, intensity of storms in the tropical Atlantic which has a huge impact on population, especially in the western part of the Atlantic basin, in Central America, in North America. So that's another Decadal phenomenon that is still debated about what the origins exactly are. Everybody knows sea surface temperatures are involved, but how do these sea surface temperature anomalies get created? The Mediterranean drying trend. I mean we are in the Mediterranean now, and countries in the Mediterranean, all the way from the west to the east, especially along the northern rim, experienced a very long protracted drought. And fingers have been pointing at the North Atlantic Oscillation, but okay, the North Atlantic Oscillation is an atmospheric phenomenon. Why does it present such exhibits, such long time scales? We still don't know. Droughts in the Southwest US, a lot of work has been done on that, and you will hear a couple talks about the origins of the drought in the oceans and so on. Still, why do the oceans exhibit this kind of variability? Can we predict the sort of variability? And more recently, this surprising hiatus, an unfortunate name that a lot of climate scientists and also people who explained this phenomenon to the media don't particularly like because it suggests that something has happened that we couldn't expect. But people did expect changes of that kind, and nobody thought that global warming is just a continuous, simple increase towards the future without any effect of natural variability. And the recent drought in California. So all these phenomena last several years, and of course affect decades, and we don't completely understand why. So just in terms of a figure that shows that, I picked up two figures here. One, the top one shows, it's all based on models, but we can show similar results for observations for the 150 year observation record that we have. The top figure shows a figure that George Bohr already presented a couple decades ago, actually, in showing the ratio between variability on timescales longer than 10 years, on periods longer than 10 years, to total inter-annual, total variability measured based on annual data. So it's the ratio between fast changing climate, the climate system, and the slow changing climate system. And you can see that there are regions where the colors are red where the decadal variability is very strong compared to the total variability. We notice things like that in the northern ocean basins. The very blue color in the tropical Pacific shows that decadal variability doesn't stand out above the strong linear phenomenon, but it's still, despite that if you only examine the decadal spectrum, you still see that there is very strong decadal variability, even in the tropical Pacific, with a lot of implication which we will talk about later in the conference. The bottom figure is an attempt to show the ratio between decadal variability and the anthropogenic climate trend. In other words, using sort of linear techniques, you can separate using the models, using a large ensemble of models. You can separate between the model response to anthropogenic greenhouse forcing and volcanoes and aerosols. You can separate that from the natural viability that occurs in the models. And what you get is the result shown below that in the tropical belt, anthropogenic variability dominates, while in the northern oceans where decadal variability is very strong, the natural viability dominates. And of course, so we do have to understand both in order to predict the future. This is all for the 20th century based on the relatively weak signal, the anthropogenic signal in the century. So, another slide that shows, okay, why are we interested in it all of a sudden? Why are there renewed interests now? And as Nsik described, from different directions there is increasing interest in the phenomenon. And at least for a few of these reasons, there are not all the reasons, but some of the reasons that we can point at, is the fact that we have new instrumental observations, particularly the Argo observations in the oceans that tell us much more than we ever could observe in the oceans. We have observations from space of the kind that is giving us more and more information, quantitative information on the planet. We also have the CME-5 attempt to predict future variability. The decadal prediction effort started under CME-5 and it shows some successes which we need to understand further, but it also showed some disappointments where we were not able to create skill based on initial conditions from the oceans. And the question is why? Why the difference between places where we have some success? Why in other places we don't? And why we still don't have good success in doing decadal predictions over the land where people are actually living? And then the Hayatos that I already mentioned. And on the paleo side, we have a tremendous new reach attempt to reconstruct climate variability on a multi-century time scale for the last thousand or even two thousand years which give us, on an annual basis, which give us a lot of information on decadal variability. And we can learn much more about the natural system and how it behaves from that. And also on the CME-5 there were several modeling centers that joined the effort to create long, multi-decadal century and millennia timescale runs or simulations in which they superimposed what we know about solar variability, volcanic variability, land use changes to see how natural either forcing, external forcing or internal variability affects the climate system. And those two together can help us learn more and provide more information to the scientific group and of course to the public about decadal variability. So these are reasons for why all of a sudden there is renewed interest. And we should pick up those things and go forward with these new observations and modeling attempts to understand better the phenomena of decadal variability. So Clivar was for a long term interested in decadal variation. Actually from the origination of Clivar, decadal variability was one of the reasons for this effort. After Toga, the famous attempt to understand the Pacific, Clivar was created with a focus on decadal variability. This is an organization diagram that you can find on the Clivar website and essentially shows that Clivar works on two different levels. One level is the regional panels and modeling panels which is all the way here on the left. And the other is cross-cutting activities that cut across the interest of each different panel and tries to bring key problems in the climate science and to the forefront creating cross-cutting activity and decadal climate variability and predictability is one of these efforts that was blessed in a meeting in the Hague about a year and a half ago in the Pank Clivar meeting. So several of you were or many of you were there. So this is how it comes into Clivar with the idea with these kind of like broad objectives that are listed here to characterize the decadal variability, to understand it better, to understand its predictability. These are all goals that we have, as I said before, new tools to try to understand them and address them to a different level. And of course to eventually capitalize on the understanding to bring information to the public who is very much in the present day interested in decadal variability facing the changes like sea level rise which is quite obvious in many places that create much more danger to coastal regions even if the storms themselves don't change. Other extremes that have plagued the planet are those extremes natural or anthropogenic. All these things the public is very interested in and is beginning to act in a way to prepare for a difficult future to many of the world's populations. I'm going to skip these slides for just the sake of time so we can move on and I'm going to just say that to address these problems Clivar created this sort of ad hoc working group many of the members of this working group are here and we will meet later this week to essentially put together a lot of the things that we prepared before but mostly things that we are learning in this conference to propose to Clivar an action plan forward, the science and how to implement it. So for this reason we are looking to help from the participants of this workshop and from the discussion from the presentations and discussions that we are going to have to hear. First of all to gain from meeting and talking about the subject and learning from the most recent science on the subject. The second thing is to make an effort to identify in as much a precise manner the obstacles that are facing us. So the more we the scientists group are able to define precisely what we want to address and how do we want to prioritize this list of obstacles that we want to address the more we will be able to gain support from funding agencies from the public to be able to continue to do this kind of research. We have to strive not to be vague but to be precise about what we want to achieve. And also in order to start action on the subject to identify existing efforts on the subject that we can invigorate and learn from and to suggest new ways in which we which don't exist at the moment to learn more about how to address the credibility. So thanks everybody again for deciding to come to this meeting. Thanks for everybody who helped organize it and I'm looking forward for a very exciting exhausting week in front of us. Thank you very much.