 So, we all want to know what will future climate bring, but our view is quite hazy, sometimes we can't see a thing. Our program looks at climate through the lens of H2O. We try to map out all the places we might go. The state was concerned with the weather getting hotter. What might climate change do to our water? So we put together a most thorough report, even longer than the last one, which itself was not short. Let's start by recalling a sad little fact. The sky gives us water, but takes most of it back. If a vapotranspiration were to make a sound, we'd hear a great slurping from the snow, plants and ground. What do the thermometers say? The warming trend continues to this very day. While temperatures wig-wiggle from year to year, the average is shifting. This much is clear. The story is different for precipitation. Despite recent dry times that brought consternation, there seems to be no distinct longer-term trend, just wet and dry back and forth with no end. The picture is similar for annual flow, low flow since 2000, but no trends to show. But the flow that we have seen is running off early, making the fish and the farmers more surly. When we look at the index developed by Palmer, it tells us that soil moisture drops when it's warmer. So while rain gauges alone may not point it out, we are seeing a trend towards more soil moisture drought. To sum up what we see in the recent decades, more heat, more drought, flow and earlier cascades, where we see that no recent trend has been set, we must add the caution, at least not yet. We say not yet since we have expectations from greenhouse gases trapping long-wave radiation. As long as more and more GHGs are released, temperatures will go up. It's physics, not belief. How warm will it get? What might come to call? Climate models are our best tools, but they're not crystal balls. Not trusting one model to give us the answers, we huddled the models to look for consensus. The 30 odd models, they all agree, were sure to see warming of 2 to 6 degrees. If it's 6, then Boulderites will feel like jerky, baking in the temperatures of Albuquerque. The same model temperatures, compared to the past, going up so each decade, is warmer than the last. By 2050, the average year is hotter than the hottest years for which we've been here. The warming alone will have a big effect, to make things feel drier than we would expect. Assuming there is no increase in P, more ET means less runoff for you and for me. Precipes tougher to model than the straightforward warming, with all the waves and the whirls that are swirling and forming. So less P to the south, more P to the north, that's the overall pattern for what it is worth. Here in Colorado, we could go either way. More or less precip or stay much the same. Regardless of trend, you can count on one thing. From year to year, we'll still see wild swings. ET will go up and P is uncertain, so it's a good bet there's less flow for diverting. Some models do show that we might see more water, but we still have our hands full as hot gets yet hotter. Because hot and hotter makes snow melt, yet faster, and earlier runoff is harder to capture. When the big pulse of runoff is finished by June, the fish and the farmers will be gasping too soon. And don't forget, most of the water we use is put on our crops and our Kentucky blues. Plants are like people, the hotter it gets, the more that they drink and the more that they sweat. With demand heading up and supply likely down, managers of water are preparing all around. But knowing how climate change will exactly unfold making plans for multiple futures is how they now roll. There's much more to say, but I'm under duress. I leave it to the report to fill in the rest. Please download the file from this URL, but don't print it out. The Lorax can tell.