 The topic I thought to talk about is a little bit related to what goes on and all the publicities about it, about our predictability of the climate system, can we predict the future? And I would like to talk a little bit about some of the extremes that I deal with. I have to pin the hydrologists of Waterman and today I brought you rain, so you can't complain for that. I'd like to talk about droughts, floods, and other extreme events, and here we go. The first thing I'd like to do, if it works, okay, all right, here it is. I'd like to, even though it's early morning, I'd like to take a journey with you. We're going to take off right from the center of the Amazon forest. We're going to climb up and see how the earth looks, and I hope it works. Yes, it does. And so it would be a wonderful trip. It will be very fast because I'm not given that much time. And as you see that the features of the earth are incredible. As you try to look at it, we take it for granted, but it's just a remarkable environment that we live in. And we go into about 30,000 kilometers above the earth, and then we see the planets, we see the oceans, we see the clouds. And I assume that people who visited the moon, they have even better view of the things that we only can get from a satellite here. So what it is, it's a planet that is blessed with having, being a blue planet. It's got water, it's got land, it's got weather. It also gets tectonics and unfortunately causes earthquakes and other things. So we'd like to really compare our planet earth with some of the others. I'm not a planetary scientist, but at least to the extent that I think it's useful to know, I compare the earth with two other planets, the Mars, which we always talk about, and also in this case Venus. In terms of the weather and the climate, the earth climate has about 70 or the atmosphere has about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen. Without it, we wouldn't be breathing, I guess, and 1% other gases. And the key thing is that in terms of the CO2 or carbon content, we have only 300th of a percent is what's in the earth. And one of the big controversies is whether that number is growing and getting bigger. If you compare that to Mars, which pretty much has no CO2 in the atmosphere, everything is in the ground, it has a very thin atmosphere. That means it's very much exposed and the temperature there is about minus 50 degrees. It's pretty cold, okay? And it's compared to Venus, where it has a very thick atmosphere, because it actually has 96% of its total atmosphere to be carbon dioxide, CO2. And that's the big issue. As carbon dioxide goes out, the atmosphere gets a little thicker, we have a greenhouse condition, and it gets warmed up. So this is really the reason that our planet happens to be able to sustain life as we are sitting here. And I'm probably getting bored with my talk for the next 40 minutes or so. What influences our climate, and I'd like to take a little quick journey through this one, is that definitely the earth itself and its composition, the planet itself, energy and heat that is supplied to us, and also weather and winds, and last but not least, my favorite subject, water. These things combined is what work together in order to shape our climate system. Let me just start first talking a little bit about the earth structure. And again, sorry again for taking you through a journey, this one would be longer in time, but in a few seconds, okay? We start from some 700 million years ago and see how the planet earth has shaped itself. So please pay attention because it's going to go fast, and I don't want you to miss anything. I'll run it through it twice. So this is the way the composition of the land and the oceans was, and I press the button and there is this little red thing goes up all the way to get us to zero, which is present time. You see, this is the way the planet was shaped. So planets came together, separated from each other, this is 200 million years ago, 100 million years ago, and so on. So I'm going twice through this thing, okay? So you see that it's pretty much fluid in terms of how it's composed and how it shapes itself. When we come to the present condition, which is really here, as compared to 240 million years ago, how the continents were aligned later on, 60 million years ago, and at the present time. That means it's pretty much a dynamic thing, maybe about 50 million years from now God knows which continent is going to be positioned where. So it's really important to realize that. These lines that you see are known as the tectonic lines. This is where the movements do take place, and so tectonic science in geoscience is an important one, and unfortunately along these lines are where most of the earthquakes happen. And my next slide, hopefully it works, yes, shows the locations where most of the earthquakes in recent times have occurred. So all the red dots that you see represent areas where earthquakes happen, and of course in our region you see that we are not necessarily in a situation not to get earthquakes. We do get them as well. The second part that I'd like to talk about is energy and heat. Very important for us. If you look at the earth itself, it's still pretty hot at its core, okay? And this is the thickness of the earth. If you look at the radius of the earth, it's about almost 6,000 kilometer. At the very core of the earth, the temperature is about, I don't know what temperature you like. In centigrade it's almost 3700 centigrade and 6,650 in terms of Fahrenheit. 100 degrees centigrade is when water starts boiling and you don't want to put your hand or finger or anything in it, right? Because it burns you. So imagine how hot is the core of the earth. But through this process, and I don't get into too much detail, we have various activities and some of that energy is sometimes released. Volcanoes are, for instance, one example of sometimes how the earth functions itself. And in fact, the gases and the ashes that come from volcanoes have an interesting impact on the climate as it cools the climate, okay? So, in fact, ideas have been that, well, who cares about whether the globe is warming, let's not worry about it. All we do is we get a fleet of maybe 70747s and just get sulfuric compounds and just spook them all over the atmosphere and we'll cool the earth. Okay, good for boiling, but I'm not so sure whether it's good for us as a whole. Nature, you can't really mess with nature that much. But that's called geoengineering. So, you know, it's really remarkable that volcanic activities are going on all the time and they do have an impact on the climate. That's what I wanted to say. The second one is sun. Okay, it's important to realize that the surface of the sun, the temperature is about 6000 degrees centigrade, almost 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and at the core, which is the center of the sun, it's 15 million degrees. You don't even want to think about it how hot it is, right? So, what does sun do for us? It provides the sunlight and the heat that the earth actually receives most of it. And if my animation works, this is exactly when we have solar winds or we have solar sunspots, much of that heat and radiation travels through the earth and thanks to the Van Allen Belt, which is around the earth and of course the earth atmosphere, we are blessed not to be necessarily exposed too much, even though they tell us not to sit or sleep on the beach for long because we get exposed to radiation. But the bottom line is that it is, in fact, this what we call the electromagnetic or the radiation belt of the earth that actually protects us from too much of that plasma that is passing by. Okay, so our planet in a way has a unique feature in the planetary system that actually allows us to survive and receive the right amount of heat in order to let vegetation and everything else function. Okay, which the other planets, at least to the extent that is known, are not having that. All right, what's next in my thing? So we get the earth, the radiation that comes from the sun. If you want to get an idea of what the radiation balance is, about 50%, 51% of the radiation that earth receives, the planet, is absorbed by earth. Okay, every day we walk, it's hitting the earth and it's absorbed by earth. About some fraction of it, 4% is reflected back into the space. About 20% of it is scattered and reflected by clouds. When you're flying over an area, you see clouds, clouds do play a role. They essentially let the rays go back. And some of it is scattered in the atmosphere. About 19% of it absorbed by atmosphere and clouds. And these are the balances that are known. And if these balances start changing, then we say that the earth climate is likely to be affected by these. The next issue that I want to talk about is weather and winds. Okay, because again, weather is what really shapes the daily way of our lives, etc. And as most of you know, the weather pattern around the earth is much of the heating the sun is given at the equatorial levels and towards the north and the south, depending upon, it's our winter here, we get less sun, southern hemisphere I was in Argentina two weeks ago and in Calafati at about 11.30 at night, still you have a little sunlight there which was nice. But anyhow, in the northern hemisphere, the winds go from west to east. That's why it takes a shorter time to get to London from Los Angeles. When you come back, it's a little longer and these are the prevailing winds and in the southern hemisphere, it's just the opposite and these are known as the Coriolis effect. We don't want to get into the science of it. But if you want to do a little experiment, fill the sink with water and take the plug off and see what the way the water starts spiraling and going down. In the northern hemisphere, it goes counterclockwise. If you were in the southern hemisphere, it would go in the clockwise direction. Okay, so that's the way the winds and everything is shaped and usually the wind travels from the heated area, gets cooled, goes here and then cooled towards the north pole, gets heavier, drops and starts traveling downward and that's why in these regions, the northern southern part, the winds are pretty bad because everything is, it's a traffic jam and they've got to escape somehow and that's why they start moving much faster. All right, the other thing that is important is about one third of the earth is arid or semi-arid and how you define arid, semi-arid, is California arid or semi-arid? Of course we are. If you get less than 400 millimeters of rain per year on the average, that region is considered to be arid or semi-arid. Okay, and if these, it is a beautiful view from one of the recent instruments on NASA's satellite. You see these regions that are yellowish color are about what regions of the arid, semi-arid regions are. They're usually positioned about one third from the equator north and one third from the equator south. Why? Because those are the regions where the air also gets crowded. It's pushed down, that's why California usually has very fair weather. It's nice because we have high pressure systems always dominating our weather. Okay, and those are the life of the regions that are arid, semi-arid regions. As you start traveling from the surface of the earth in the balloon, the average temperature of the earth is 15 degrees centigrade. And this is the big debate. In the past 100 years we've gone up about what? Half a degree to one degree centigrade. And this is the whole argument about the global warming. But as if you take off in a plane, you get to level where the planes cruise about 35,000 feet. If you look at the little screens these days that give you a map, the temperature is always what? Minus 50 degrees, minus 60 degrees. This is in the troposphere and eventually you get to tropopause and then you get to stratosphere. Each one of these layers of the atmosphere play a key role in terms of how again our climate is shaped. But we personally and collectively are mostly affected with the lower levels of the atmosphere because that's where most of the weather happens. All the clouds are formed and water vapor moves and so on. Let me now take you through the water world, okay? In the water world it's interesting to know that all the waters in the world are planet. If you put them in one of the big water bottles that we are familiar with, it's all salty except for one teaspoon. Okay, so I'm trying to give you a relative sense of what's the amount of fresh water on Earth vis-a-vis all the salty water in the ocean, okay, which we cannot drink unless we desalinate it. Okay, so this little spoon is what keeps life and what keeps on the tables that we drink and we have to of course conserve and all that good stuff. So totally about 97% of the water on Earth is ocean water. Of that little amount, 2.5% which is fresh water, about 68% of it is ice. Glaciers in the north or the south or inland glaciers. Greenland is another one that has a lot of that ice. And the big controversy or argument is how fast is it melting and therefore we might be losing the proportion that amount of that. The biggest chunk after the glaciers are in the groundwater and then a little bit of it left for the fresh waters that we see in our rivers, lakes and in our atmosphere, okay, very, very small fractions. Ocean water and ocean circulation plays an extremely critical role in shaping our climate. This is the engine. So if you look at this, the reddish colors are the upper parts of the ocean and the blue lines are the deeper parts of the ocean and these are humongous rivers of water within the ocean that travel this path. Okay, and sometimes it takes about 30 to 50,000 years for deep waters to come to the surface, be evaporated and go through what we call the hydrologic cycle. Okay, so it's important to realize and one of the big issues scientifically has been when this circulation slows down, climate in many regions changes. Okay, the little ice age that has happened is because in the upper northern Atlantic they say that the circulation slowed down, okay. All right, this is again taking you through a tour of what we teach in our classes, hydrologic cycle from the ocean surface with the heat that we get. We evaporate the water from the plants. Plants also evaporate the water through transpiration, through the mechanism of photosynthesis. They go up, they cool down thanks to mountains sometimes, it pushes that moist air up and then we get precipitation, sometimes in the form of snow, sometimes in the form of rain, right. Eventually all that water has to go someplace, starts running off from the surface in our rivers and lakes, some of it infiltrates into the soil and becomes part of the groundwater system, all right. And this is how the water in the earth is constant in its amount, but its circulation depends upon time, location, et cetera. All right, so this is a little tour of the hydrologic cycle for you. Since Luis has given me a very limited time, a better rush, part of that weather that we have or water that we have is in the atmosphere, very minute fraction of it. The residence time, and usually it goes up, forms clouds, precipitation occurs and this cycle keeps continuing. The average time water stays in the atmosphere is about 10 days. So it's not, it's the shortest life for the water in the hydrologic cycle. This is a beautiful view from Tucson. I used to live there until five years ago at the University of Arizona. It's just above my house. And in the summers you get these convective clouds and it's beautiful. The other parts of it is, of course, I have water in the form of ice. There are wonderful glaciers that you see and, of course, Greenland itself. And the Arctic and Arctic, you see icebergs sometimes floating in the ocean. I'm sure some of you have seen. Snow is the one that, of course, we care most because that falls on our mountains and we got to, this is a helicopter when we were in Arizona going making a measurement of how deep the snow is and how would it fill the reservoirs. And we in the Americas, whether we are North America or the South America, we are blessed. We happen to have the largest amount of all the freshwater that exists on the planet Earth. The Great Lakes perhaps is almost 50% of the total freshwater that is available. And then after that, of course, you go to the Amazon. Amazon Basin is the other one that has a large amount of water. But there are different rivers, different places and different shapes. This is in Madagascar. And these sediments that are flowing into the ocean also play a critical role. So one of the arguments when you dam a river, you don't allow the sediments to go, then you have beach erosion and all the other problems that accompany it. Well, again, we don't have necessarily Amazon River, but we have Colorado River. And probably the water you're drinking part of it comes from there. And this is perhaps one of the most regulated rivers on Earth, well managed. Of course, we fight with each other. When I was in Arizona, I considered you guys the enemy. Now I'm in California and I don't know exactly which side to take. But we always have these arguments. This is one of the last dams built on the system. Lake Powell or Grand Canyon Dam. It's marvelous that that system provides water for so much that goes on in the western United States. If I compare Hoover Dam to another controversial dam, you've heard of Three Gorges Dam right in China. There are humans whether it was right to build it or not, but the bottom line is it was built. If you look at the total volume of how much water it holds, it's equal to pretty much what Lake Mead or Hoover Dam holds. The big difference is there are two different rivers. So the amount of flow that we get through the Colorado River is not necessarily what we get through the Yangtze River. So if the dams were built today and we start plugging them to fill them up, I have put a question as a quiz of how long do you think it would take to fill the Three Gorges Dam from start to as compared to the Lake Mead? Well, I'm sure you all know the answer, but I can't wait that long. It's about 32 days for the Three Gorges Lake to fill because of the magnitude of the water. For our little river here, it takes two and a half years before we fill that reservoir. Okay, so we have enough resilience in the system, but when we have sustained droughts every year after every year after a year, it becomes a problem. The big question as to whether our planet is warming up and the hydrologic cycle is intensifying has been addressed by a recent report and I've heard of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That was the core recipient of the Nobel Prize and I'm proud to say that nine of us at UC Irvine were part of the team that wrote that report, so we are kind of Nobel laureates, but we didn't get any penny out of it. Okay, so it has been addressed and if you look at the temperatures both in the north hemisphere and southern hemisphere, they are actually going up, so nobody's arguing about that. The question is what's causing it? Is it natural or is it human induced? If you look at just the glaciers and at the various parts of the world, you will see they have receded from 1909 to 2000, so these are evidences that in fact something has happened. It's melting, so it must be warming if somebody argues. If you look at last year, 2007, the redder the color, the hotter it is as compared to a 30-year average. So as you see last year, 2007 in the northern hemisphere, was perhaps one of the hottest years on record that has been accumulated. On the southern hemisphere, it wasn't as bad. So in fact, it compared with 1998 as the second warmest year. Okay, well, now predictable this climate, this year I'm not so sure. If you look at Central Asia or East Asia, in the past four or five weeks, they've been going through an incredibly cold spell, and that wasn't the case the past few years. So it tells you that nature is very complex, hard to understand, so you cannot necessarily predict it that well. And the other thing is that the fact that we get one winter that is very cold does not mean that the global warming is not happening, because you have to look at the long-term records. As you see, Earth has four billion years of life, okay? So here we go, climate and water resources, because at the end of the day for us and my students and my colleagues here, we worry about how do these affect the availability of water, all right? Because that's what sustains an economy and the growth of a region. Can we predict the future changes? And what is being done to study the climate? Let me take you through a little course in physics, and that's pretty simple. You probably read it some years ago in kindergarten, maybe. So the bottom line is that as we provide heat or temperature, as the temperature goes up, one thing happens is that water evaporates. You can experiment that with the teak pot, and you will see what I'm talking about. As you warm up the Earth and the atmosphere, the water holding capacity of the atmosphere increases. If you think of this particular amount of space in the air, and if I increase the temperature by 20 degrees Fahrenheit, I can pack in twice as much water molecules in this bottle as I have now, okay? So that means with warming, the appetite of the atmosphere to receive water increases. So if you have more water in the atmosphere, and I said it only can hang around there for 10 days, what goes up must come down. As a result of that, we say that the hydrologic cycle intensifies. We get more precipitation. All right, so that's what I said. And then water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas, and that's important to realize. As this warming happens, this consequence of this is that we are now noticing more intense weather situations, more extreme droughts, more extreme floods, and every day if you open the newspaper or listen to CNN or any of them, some part of the world is what, suffering through major floods or droughts. And if you look at the U.S., by the way, the past 100 years, this data is very accurate, about 7% increase in rainfall over the United States. But what's remarkable is that the incidence of heavy rainfall has increased by 20%. We see more severe storms happening, okay, particularly in the tornado valley, et cetera. This is one of the big things about global warming, that it may not rain all the time, but when it rains, well, you better be out of the way, because this is exactly what is happening. We see major floods happening, and the good thing is in the U.S. we have a wonderful warning system. People are alerted. If you go to places such as Tana Valley in Kenya, the rains could happen about 100 kilometers away, and poor villagers don't know anything, and suddenly a flood wave comes, and that's been really ruining a lot of lives and property. And some of the work that my center does is try to see how we can bring easy ways for these people to know what's going to be coming their way, and through cell phones and things like that. Do you think we have not had major floods in our area? This is downtown Los Angeles in 1955. There was a major storm. So incidents of heavy rainfall and extremes are always there, but the big thing is that it's happening more and more as we get into the future. Hurricanes are becoming much more intense. When they do occur, this is Catarina, and we know what devastation that brought to that region. Drought is the other thing that we worry about, and that's lack of rainfall, and that's, of course, something that we found that in the United States over the millennia, we've had periods where we've had multiple, multiple years of drought. Okay? This chart is interesting because it takes sediments from the bottom of the lakes. Lois, I see a 15-minute one. So I better rush. Anything above the line means that we had more than average rainfall. And this is in central Redbasket of the United States near Nebraska and from a salt that they took from a lake and analyzed. It's almost a 2,000-year record of the climate in that region. Anything below this line represents periods when we didn't have enough rainfall and drought. You see there were periods where 100 years of drought continued on, okay? Way back 1,500 years ago. If you come to the recent years, we always talk about the dust bowl. Dust bowl was nothing as compared to what has happened in the past. So you have to always look at things and you can't get too excited because Earth itself has a history of how it does things the way it does. And we've had severe droughts in the past. So challenges of predicting the future of climate while we have scientists are trying to understand these things, it is not that easy. Okay, let me give you some examples. We use gigantic computers. We have climate models. There are different groups at different parts of the world working on them and trying to improve our ability to predict the climate better. These are predictions of climate and rainfall for the next 25 years by two different models, climate models. If you look, they look pretty much similar. Anything that is bluish, that means more rain. Anything below yellow and reddish are regions that are expected in the next 25 years to get what, drier, okay? Interestingly enough, you look at the areas that I circled, different models say different things. If you look at our region, one model says that we're going to get wetter in the next 25 years, the other one said we're going to get drier. So those are the difficulties and challenges we face in terms of predicting the future because Mother Nature is very complex. It doesn't matter how smart the scientists are and try to be, but we are making some headways in these areas. Let me show you the US. These are some assessments done by the US to see how arch. If you look at the western United States again, we are showing, as I showed before, one model says we're going to get wetter, the other one said get drier. The model that says we're getting better is the Canadian model, which is a good model, but I think they did that purposely because they always know that we are after their water. They said, don't worry about it. We are in good shape, so you don't have to worry about it. Lake Powell, Colorado River, normal year, and here is 2004 where the water had dropped because we didn't have enough snowpack. And this is a magnificent picture thanks to National Geographic magazine. You see that the level of the water in the normal year would have been there. We are about 30 meters down, okay? And California, how we are experiencing. This is a satellite view of measuring rainfall from space. As these colors change, if you remember January 2005, we had one week that rains kept coming and coming and coming. In fact, we got total amount of rain equal to what we would get in one year, in one week. Okay, that was 2005. What happened in 2007? Just the opposite. Last year, we got almost a trickle of rainfall. And if you look at, for instance, Riverside County, they had only one inches of rainfall. And as a result of that, we had dryness. We had all the fires that took place, et cetera. And what is the impact of these things is really on the forest. Long-term droughts make the trees to be weak, susceptible to bark beetles that chew through the core, make the trees die. And when a camper is careless, we get, of course, forest fires, and it changes the conditions of the earth. We don't have enough vegetation cover, not enough friction on the surface when it burns. And we get sediments moving, and that's why they're always worried about after a fire. If you have intense rain, what is we going to have? Mudslides and landslides, et cetera. The $1 million question, getting, hopefully, close to that, who is responsible for the warming? Is nature or us? I'll leave that to you to decide, but the bottom line... The bottom line is that, much of that is that we, as humans, are being blamed for is the emissions, the CO2, because that causes... It's a very simple thing. When the trees are healthy and photosynthesis happens, it takes the CO2, oceans take the CO2, and it goes through the seasonal changes, and when these things fall apart and start burning, it, in fact, what? Adds more CO2. That's the natural part of the system. Then we have all the cars, and all the other things that cause things that happen. So I better rush, and I got the 10-minute notice, and forest and wildfires do happen. Forest management in the U.S. has been very effective. The problem is that the more you protect the forest and don't let nature do what it's supposed to do, you build fuel, and when it happens, it goes in a raging way, and we get these incredible forest fires that unfortunately do damage. So this picture is from satellite, shows regions of the Earth in one snapshot, who actually are burning. In fact, they put a nice thing they've done. They put a history of two years, and as I'm going through this from 2001 to 2002, for 24 months, you see which parts of the Earth actually are either wildfires, brush fires, or forest fires. So much of that is the natural process, and of course, natural if it's due to a lightning. But if I'm a careless person and cause a fire, unfortunately, that is something that we as humans do. All right. Let me see one. So we've known all of that has resulted in what we see at the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going out, thanks to Keeling, who was at Scripps and set up a station here some years ago. He passed away a couple of years ago. He left a legacy that will live forever, and that's where we became very much aware that we may be as humans are causing some of these to go up. And the question is how far it goes up and causes problems. And in a way, this is what I showed before, but it changes the balance of the radiative transfer of the Earth. So when we have this shield created, which is like a greenhouse, warming happens. I won't get into it too much. Challenge is ahead. We are trying to do better observation of the Earth. We better try to do better models. We have a lot of satellite missions. So support NASA. Make sure that they do things for planet Earth, because I'm an earthy guy. There are people who like to study other planets, which is important. But we have to pay attention to our own planet. So these are the range of different satellites that are flying around the Earth and providing information to us. What is a satellite do? This is what our eyes see in this range in the electromagnetic spectrum. Satellites can see things that we cannot. That's why it's so important to have these. We pick up these signals. We know the difference between a healthy plant and a sick plant from almost a thousand miles above the Earth. We have some remarkable satellites that have been put in space. We can measure rainfall. This is one of the satellites. We have other satellites that have been launched under the Earth observation system. This one has about 10 different instruments on it. It's almost the size of a bus. Two of these have been launched. Each of these instruments does its own thing, studying and measuring everything from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of the ocean or even a couple of feet under the ocean and soil moisture on the ground, etc. So much of that information is relayed down to Earth and we take it and try to make sense of what's happening. All right. Let me see where I'm next. This is, again, one of those satellites. In fact, it all does what a tomography does or a cat scan does to a human body. Some of these satellites can actually cut through the storms and see exactly what is the genesis and how much rainfall we get out of these systems. We can actually zoom in very effectively in a very minute. These are, of course, the satellites that are available to the public, but I can tell you a spy satellite probably can see a lot better than we can imagine. And these are some features of the Earth that are incredible. This is Kabir Lut in the desert region of Iran. It's almost like a painting. And these are what you can see from space. Finally, a brief review of global water resources, which brings me close to the five minutes. Will we be running out of water? Because I guess that's always the question. These red dots represent mega cities. And these are cities that have populations of over $10 million, not dollar. We always think of dollar. 10 million people or more. You see Asia is going to be having most of those cities. In our region, we do actually have quite a few of them in the Western United States. And the interesting thing you have to notice is the global urban population in 1970 or so was about 37% of the earth population of what it was. Now it's going to grow to 8.3 billion people. By 2010, almost more than 50% of people moved to the cities. And don't think of California and others, but go to poorer countries where this influx of people coming from villages puts additional burdens on the water supply, sanitation and whatnot. If you look at the amount of flow in the Yellow River of China, if you look from 1972 to 1998, these are the number of days that there was no water making it to the ocean. What is that water going? Being used up within the path. So by 1998, there were 280 days there was no water making it into the ocean through the Yellow River. Groundwater. San Joaquin Valley, California. You know what this is? This is a telephone pole, of course. In 1925, the land, the earth used to be up there because they pumped so much water out, the land subsided and settled to where it was in 1975. The good thing is it's all uniform sand. You don't notice it even though your house is going down. I reached my five minutes. And it happens in many parts of the world because we're over-pumping the groundwater and mechanical pumps have caused this. How about the water resources situation in California? We are blessed. All these yellow, red and green lines represent all the aqueduct systems. It's a remarkable system. It's a model for the world and we should be very proud of it. It takes water from point A to point B when it's needed. We get nearly 75% of our water rainfall in the northern part of the state. But interestingly enough, almost 65% of the use is in the southern part of the state. So that's why sometimes folks in San Francisco or others don't like us. So I don't know what we can do about it, but that's life. If you look at it, just take California. The green areas represent how much water is used in the agricultural sector. The yellow represents how much is domestic and the blue represents in the industry. So as you see, agriculture is the biggest user of the water. So that's the elephant. We are the tail of the elephant, if you wish. In terms of the water consumption, most of the western U.S. you see it's the same thing. What we've done, we've built incredible engineering structures to store the water and to send it to places where it's need. This shows the history of dams in the United States from back from 1800. As you see the number of dots, it represents how many dams and reservoirs are in the United States. It's 70,000 of them. So if you think we have too many, China has about 80,000. And they're still building. Coming to the end of my talk, we have much to be thankful for. Honestly. We're a rich country as much as we complain, but you just look at washing laundry in a creek in Ivory Coast. So these are the water that probably goes down and provides the water supply for some other community. You look at places that people have to line up to get water. We just take it for granted, open the tap and we get the water. We've come up with incredible technologies. We can go from pretty bad water to pretty good water. Orange County, every day is now taking the sewer water about 80 million gallons of it and purifying it to a point where it's so pure that if they put it in a pipe, it's going to corrode the pipe. They have to add salt to it in order to make it less corrosive. And so this is how we are trying to do things and if you have the money, you can do a lot. I come to thank my group of scientists. This is UC Irvine. I guess we are some place around here. I don't know where we are, but anyhow. These are some of the folks that have worked with me over the past six years from University of Arizona where I came from and some of my current people in my group. And my center here and the one that I founded at the University of Arizona was the Water Prize Winners for 2007 in an award ceremony. It's the beautiful Parliament building in Budapest in last November. And with that I want to give you a couple of websites. If anybody is interested in water information, one of them is Sahro which is the center that was established at the University of Arizona before I came. It has remarkable information about water issues. You can google and say Sahro. Sahro in Persian means Seminary Desert. In fact, that's the focus of that center. And don't tell me how easy it was or difficult it was to come up with a name for the center that would have an acronym Sahro. And my center here at the University of California Irvine and we do mostly satellite-based information for many parts of the world and thank you very much. And this is one glacier that shows no recession. This is the Moreno not watershed glacier in Argentina that is extremely stable and there is no sign of global warming there and I was there three weeks ago and took this picture. Thank you very much.