 Thanks very much. So my name is Jay Famlietti. I'm a professor in the Earth System Science Department and also in Civil and Environmental Engineering. And I'm the director of a center called the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling. In our research group, we use satellites and developed computer models to track how freshwater availability is changing around the world. You saw some of that in the movie. So who went to the movie? Like, did everybody go to the movie? All right, what happened to these guys here? All right, I didn't get so. You guys over here, who went? Yeah, that's good. You can lie, it's fine. So I hope you enjoyed it. And I want to kind of have a discussion format today to talk about it. Before we get started, I know that Professor Matthew talked to you a little bit about some of what I want to go over right now. So I'd like to cover some of the research that we've been doing on looking at regions where we're gaining and losing freshwater. I guess before I do that, I want to get a sense of the distribution of who's in the room in terms of education. Do we have people that are here from high school, college, or undergraduates, graduate students? So then what is the other? The rest of the people, it didn't raise their hands. Are we professional? What are we? We're friends. We're professionals. You're what? We're from different countries, and all the different kind of acting in these various days. OK, all right, good. I see. So we're all involved in sustainability in one way or another. OK, so I detected an accent there. So how about if we shout out what countries we're from? They're not the United States. Brazil? Brazil? Nigeria? Cambodia, Nigeria. Yes, China? Burma. Burma? South Korea? Israel. Oh, Israel, OK. South Korea, right? Did the team win yesterday? Or did the soccer team win? Or lose? Did you watch? I didn't watch. You didn't watch? OK, I don't know. I lost track. Who knows who won that soccer game? No one knows. All right, never mind. They tied, OK. And where are you from? You're from the US? OK. OK. Haiti. Great, Haiti. India. India. Russia. Costa Rica. Costa Rica. Very nice. OK, now you people need to slow down, OK? Very limited powers to take it all in. So a pretty diverse group, and that's very cool. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to start off with this map, because it's something that we've been working on in our group for a while now. And I think it's something that's really certainly shaping my career, and I think the careers of many of my students. Because what we see in this map, I think it's pretty compelling in some of the other things that perhaps you saw yesterday from Professor Matthew, which I can review kind of quickly here. It's pretty compelling stuff. And it raises a lot of issues. And it's sort of what led me to think about some of the things that are written in this post and some of the things that I want to talk with you about. So this is a map, and it's a map of changing fresh water availability all over the world. And it's from a satellite called Grace, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, which is a gravity-based NASA mission, basically is weighing changes in water storage. Water is really heavy. And so when a lot of water leaves a region, say, due to groundwater depletion or enters a region, due to a flood or a huge snowstorm or something, it changes the gravity field. And these satellites gets heavier or gets lighter. And actually affects the gravitational attraction on these satellites. They get pulled and pushed around. And so we can measure the pulling and pushing around of these satellites in space and convert that into a map that looks like this. So the mass changes that we're seeing on land, on monthly and longer timescales or over these past 10 years, are largely due to changes in water storage, OK? So on this map, and really, we have an updated version now that goes through 2012 that looks almost exactly like this. So for the last 10 years, we've been seeing these regions that are gaining water and losing water. And in this figure, the red areas are losing water. And the blue areas are gaining water. So there's a few things that kind of pop out. We have a lot of the trends labeled on each of those in a minute. But there's overall sort of big picture issue that we see. And that is that we see a lot of blue here at high latitudes here up in the Arctic. And we see a lot of blue here in the tropics. And this is the stuff that's been predicted by climate models, like those from the IPCC. Do we know what the IPCC is? Who knows? Who doesn't know? Raise your hands. Don't be shy. OK, IPCC stands for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's an international body of scientists that essentially is convening continuously, but every four or five years, releasing reports on climate change and the latest science and summarizing the science and sort of looking at the state of the climate and where it's going gives feedback to governments around the world about steps that can be taken to mitigate climate change and to adapt to climate change. So it involves a lot of modeling, computer modeling, of climate and how climate is going to change in the future. A lot of the predictions about future climate come from these computer models that almost every government in the world invests. So we invest in four or five or six major climate modeling labs here in the United States, like National Center for Atmospheric Research, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab on the East Coast, and NASA has a couple. Anyway, the computer models that we use to understand and predict climate change project that we will be seeing a drying of the mid latitudes and wetting up of the high latitudes and the low latitudes. So the dryer is getting drier, and wet area is getting wetter. And so after about 10 years of grace data, I argue that we're kind of seeing this because already, so what these models are predicting, we're starting to see in our data. Because we've got a lot of blue up here. We have a lot of blue through here. And we have a lot of red in the mid-latitudes. So that's one thing for us to be concerned about, because a lot of us live in the red and the yellow area. Now, what about all the red and the yellow spots on this map? The big ones, the biggest ones, the biggest spots, the biggest areas of water loss, are tied to the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. So we know that those are melting. And this mission, this grace mission, is one of the key ways now that we use to measure the melt rates of the ice sheets. So it's been a huge contribution to understanding these melting rates. The other big red spots that sort of jump out that are very strong are the glaciers melting. So not just the ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, not just the polar ice sheets, but the alpine glaciers. The mountain glaciers say in Alaska and Patagonia and a little bit around the Tibetan plateau here in the Himalayas. But after that, almost all of these red spots that we see are related to groundwater depletion from the major aquifers all over the world, in particular in these mid-latitudes, in these arid and semi-arid regions. So we've seen groundwater depletion here in Beijing and the North China Plain, all around the Himalayas. So Northwest India, Bangladesh, over here in Northwest Australia, starting to see more happening here in Africa, Northern Africa. Certainly the Middle East has been a hotspot for a long, long time. And then as we move over to the West, this is that drought that's been going on for so long here in the Southeast and is now spreading into Texas. So this is sort of combination drought and groundwater depletion signal because let's be clear, when there's a drought, the human response is to use more groundwater. So by definition, there's not much rain. So there's river flows are lower if there's any rivers at all. So we hit the groundwater even harder. So that's something that's happening here. Some of our big agricultural regions in the United States, the High Plains Aquifer, Ogallala Aquifer, where we grow in the United States. So we have a very international crowd here. The biggest agricultural regions in the US are the High Plains Regions of Texas in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, all up through the central part of the country. That's where we grow our grains, corn, wheat. And we use a lot of groundwater to do that. So groundwater is the water that's stored under the ground as opposed to surface water like rivers and lakes. And here in California, in the Central Valley. So the central part of the state is a huge agriculture. It's the second most productive agricultural region after the High Plains region. And in California, we grow a lot of produce, a lot of fruit, a lot of vegetables. We have a lot of cows. We grow a lot of grapes. We make a lot of wine. And all that takes a lot of water. And so we are, in all of those red spots, using groundwater at a pace that it's faster, than is way faster than is being replaced. So this sort of gets to the heart of sustainability. How fast are you using it? How much is there? How are you gonna manage it for the long term? And so in many cases, we don't really know those answers and perhaps we can talk about some of that. And some of this was covered in the movie that a lot of you guys saw. Let's see what else we have here. So we took some of these red spots and did some detailed studies of what was going on. And so this is kind of how we know that it's groundwater. We look at a region like the Central Valley in California that I was just talking about. And we can put together a bunch of different data sets of what's happening with the snow, what's happening with the soil moisture and the reservoirs, and then figure out from what we see from the GRACE data how much of that has groundwater depletion. So we kind of do more detailed studies on a lot of those spots that are on that map that I just showed you. And so this one's showing the rates of groundwater depletion in the Central Valley and from about 2003 through 2009, 2010. And I guess the most important thing to look at is these two piecewise trends here. So sort of no trend in the early part of the study and then a big decreasing trend. And so what happened here is that everything was fine. There was plenty of snow in this time period and farmers were doing great and growing plenty of food. And then we get into this drought. And in California, we move a lot of water around down here in Southern California. People who live in Southern, who lives in Southern California? Okay, so the people that are not my students, where does our water come from here in Southern California? Sacramento, Colorado. Right, right. So we get water from up north, which itself comes from snow melt. And we get water from the Colorado River Basin, most of which is derived from snow melt. And there's one more. I've said the word about 50 times in the last minute. Groundwater. Groundwater, right. So that's local, okay. So what happened with the farmers is that their surface water allocations, especially the guys that are down here, their allocation of the surface water here from the Sacramento River Basin, we put it into aqueducts, just like the Romans, and send it down from the north to the south. Well, their allocation was cut way back because there was a drought and there wasn't enough. And so they started getting the groundwater really hard. And so that explains most of this decline here. So we're using it to grow food, but we're depleting it, right? And in the United States, we really don't have great, I mean, we monitor groundwater through the US Geological Survey. We have a feeling for how much it's changing, but we are not required to report pumping rates, right? So the groundwater withdrawals, if you have a well on your property, those extractions are unregulated. So you can just pump and pump and pump away. So for sustainability issues, this is an important problem, right? Because it's a common resource. If I use it without restraint, I'm using some that you could be using. And even spatially, if I live here on this farm and I start pumping away, a lot of the water that's coming out of that well is being drawn away from underneath your property, okay? So we have issues here that we need to think about because eventually we'll run out of water to keep going at these rates. And in this study, we showed that over about, well, mostly in this time period here from 2006 through 2009, we used about two thirds the volume of lake meat, equivalent of groundwater. Lake meat, for those of you who are from out of the country is a big reservoir that is just outside of Las Vegas. It stores a lot of water for the Western US or for us here in California. And it holds about 35 cubic kilometers of water. So the losses of groundwater were about 20 cubic kilometers. So it's not just happening in California. You're from Israel, right? So here we are in the Middle East. A little of this part of the signal that we're looking at is more of the Northern part. So we're looking at Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, so just to zoom in on one of those big red spots on the map. And the same deal, I mean, this is just showing the long-term trend over the time period here. And in this case, we lost about, or that region has lost about 85, 90 cubic kilometers of groundwater, which is a ton, okay? Mostly we think for agriculture. And although we don't have it out here, you know, the Israel, Jordan, Palestine signal is also very, very strong. So did you go to the movie? Did you like the part about the collaboration stuff at the end? Yeah, yeah. Good, we can talk later. I really want to know what you think. And we're making a trip, so my group is making a trip there in January. So maybe you have some suggestions about people that we could visit and talk about this sort of work. And when we look at that map, it actually does extend right over Israel and Jordan. And so we all know that in this region, there's, you know, it's a region that's prone to conflict. It's a region that's been having conflict over water for as long as humans have been alive up in the Tigris and Euphrates. And that's been going on forever. So control of the water is, you know, it's a power thing as well as a resource thing. We have some students here from India. One of the first papers that we wrote where we started zooming in on these spots was on groundwater depletion in India. And I think Professor Matthew may have shown you this one as well. But the same deal where we go into a region, we try to figure out what's going on from available data sets. And we can see in this region that the groundwater from this dash blue line, the groundwater losses were about 109 cubic kilometers in a shorter time period, about six years. So again, about in U.S. centric terms about three times the volume of like me. And a lot of it's coming from the agricultural region here. In the Punjab region, big agricultural region is very similar to the central valley. So a lot of dependence on groundwater, big population, lots of farmers, okay. And lots of concern about the future. So it's not just happening in those few spots, but so this map really, so the base map here is a map of the world's major aquifers. And what I've done now is show you in the time history of many of those red spots that were aquifers on that map. So we just took the red spots and linked them to the various aquifers around the world and made plots of what's happening over time. So you can see that the trend in most of the mid, the arid and semi arid regions are what I'm also calling the subtropics in the mid-latitudes. We're seeing a lot of groundwater depletion there, okay. So this sort of gets to the heart of the sustainability issue. I'm not sure I wanted to show you other slides. I'll just leave this up just in case. So this gets to the heart of the sustainability issue. And one of the things that's emerged from our work, from talking in fact to politicians, is that there is some key questions. And if you have to just break it down to three questions when you're thinking about water sustainability, three that we've been talking about in our group are how much do we have? So how much surface water, how much groundwater? And we could break that down into different parts, like how much is there? And then how much can we get into our water management system? So it's almost two different things. And how much do we need? And this is an important question. And so when I say how much do we need, I mean everything. I mean how much does the environment need? How much do we need for agriculture? How much do we need in our domestic lives? And we can't be unrealistic. We have to recognize that it takes water to grow the economy. It takes water to have a steady economy. And so we have to be thinking about those needs. And how to figure out how much do we need? How that varies over time? How does it change one place to another? How much does agriculture really need? There's questions that are very, very difficult to answer. And then the third thing is how are those things changing over time? How are needs changing over time? We might be getting more efficient crops. We might be thinking about changing crops in one region to a different type of crop. We might have great increases in efficiency in irrigation. We may change our habits at home. We may get much greater technologies. The .2 gallon flush toilet in the United States, we're all excited about 1.2 gallons. So our needs may change. And of course the supply will change over time. But how much water we have part will change and it will change with climate change. So it will change as say here in the Western U.S. or in the Himalayan region or the Alps in Europe as the climate warms, snow's gonna melt. And so that supply of water that was stored there on the mountains won't be there anymore. And we may get liquid precipitation and we may not, the projections in California and the Western U.S. are in fact that we won't. It's not like we'll just go from snow to liquid precipitation and then figure out how to capture some of that liquid precipitation. The predictions are that the snow won't be there. The snowpack in California, the predictions are, who's from California? Again, thank you, okay. And the people that are my students or Chase. Do you have any idea what the snowpack will look like? How much snow we'll have at the end in the Sierras at the end of the century? I bet it's really bad. Yeah, I bet it's really bad. Good guess. Yeah, it was kind of a leading question. Do you tell what I can give you? So, yeah, I mean, 80 to 90% decrease relative to the first part. Relative to... But see, really bad. It is really bad. You were right. And it's not clear that we're just gonna have liquid precipitation, right? It's the total amount of precipitation will decrease too. So we've got some issues with planning and sustainability when it comes to water. So I have just a few more things to say and then I hopefully can engage you guys in conversation and questions and what I'd really like to hear from some of the international participants to find out what their experiences are, what they think of when they see this map and they say, oh, yeah, here's what's going on here. But there are some things that are brought up in this post here. And I think they're important for you to realize. And one of them is that we really don't know how much water we have, okay? We really don't know globally or really even in the United States how much, say, how much water, how much fresh water we have available. We have not made the effort to measure how much groundwater we have in all of our major aquifers, maybe with the exception of the high plains aquifer. But in California, we don't know, okay? We don't know because we haven't done it because we've always had enough water, the population hasn't been as great and water hasn't had the value, say, that oil has, okay? So that's one issue. Another issue is that, you know, from the perspective of someone who works on developing computer models to understand what's going on now and to predict the future, I know that there are certain important observations that don't exist. And a couple of those are that we don't have a three-dimensional description of our groundwater aquifers. We don't. Again, if you use the oil analogy, if we were worried about oil all over the country, which we are, we have lots of descriptions of the oil reservoirs. We don't have the similar descriptions for our water reservoirs. And it's important because we need to integrate them into our models, especially those models that are large scale that we used to understand climate change and climate change impact on big regions. And so it's true in the United States and it's certainly true globally. Let me throw another one at you. We don't really know how deep our soils are. And so that may not seem like a big deal, but we're talking about our water environment. We're talking about the environment where our water resides. And so the depth of the soil, so if you just think about sort of a cross section looking at a, if we were able to go outside here and just drill down into the ground and slice open a face of the soil, kind of like a road cut when you drive through road cuts on highways. We don't really know how deep the soil is before we hit the bedrock. This is a problem because a lot of water is stored there. Okay, it hasn't been measured. Maybe individual states or countries have done it. We certainly haven't done it here in the United States. A few of our states have. We don't have a map in California of how deep the soils are. This is a problem. I could go on and on. Yes, question? Can you repeat that again? We don't know how deep our soils are. That's the bottom line, okay? And that's important because a lot of water is stored in soils. And so you need to know how big the reservoir is to know how much water is there, right? I mean, I feel like we need a new definition of renewable. Right. Especially if we don't know how much water we have. Right, right, okay. So that's an excellent question. I think it gets to the heart of what we need to do to manage our water sustainably. So bring that up again in just a moment. And then the third thing, because I'm a computer modeler really by training, and that's about half of what we do in our research group. So we need to have models. People may ask, why do we need to have computer models? Well, we need to predict the future. And whether we're talking about small scales and predicting floods, of course we need to be able to predict floods and it would be great to be able to predict droughts and to be able to predict the future so we can plan. So we absolutely need computer models. So as someone who develops the models, I will say that we've done a great job with the resources that we have available to us, but we have an awful lot of work to do to make them more realistic. And one of the reasons that I'm saying that is because our computer models right now cannot reproduce this. This is real, this is very real, shows the human fingerprint on the water landscape, but our global models and our national scale models cannot reproduce this because the processes that drive this stuff, like groundwater depletion and water management and reservoir storage and the conveyances that we have all around the world and here in California, those things aren't in the models. So it's impossible to reproduce that. So in a sense, it's impossible to reproduce and predict groundwater availability in the future in a very real sense. And that's the kind of stuff that I was just testifying on. So I'm working hard to get that message out. So I call those things the unfortunate realities of sort of like the inconvenient truth stuff, but I wanted to use a different word or a different phrase. And they really underlie answering the questions of how much water do we need? How much water do we have? And how is it gonna change in the future? We can't answer those questions which are at the heart of sustainability without the observations and the tools. It can't be done. So that's my message. That was my message to Congress the other day that's the message. I like to have a consistent message rather than just blow a lot of hot air. It's this stuff that we're doing with the GRACE data and it's the realization that there's big shortcomings with our models and just kind of taking a step back and seeing the big picture and like the stuff that we talked about in the movie, I think that was really a catalyst for me too to start thinking about this stuff. Realizing what are the questions that we need to answer and what are the tools that we need to tackle sustainability. So that's about all I wanna say because I could really go on and on and could easily make you guys cry because I make myself cry. So I just wanna open it up to some questions and also questions about the movie are fine too and there may be other slides that I wanna pull up here and show you guys. First reaction, thank you. Question. I got your presentation, I love the film. Thank you. No, it was. Thank you. I mean for science and citizens to work together to create better solutions for sustainability and I'm really questioning how important these three questions are. You know, that you are telling us is so important. Like the fact that we don't know how much water we have and we don't know how much is in the soil and the reason I'm questioning that is because what I have observed and what I find from my experience is that even if we don't know exactly how much there is and we don't know exactly where it is the most critical question is how are we managing whatever we do now and then what are the political issues that are enabling us to do that management well? Right. And that's what I actually found came out in the film very strongly that like it's a political question. So that was one of the really big, and I'm wondering why are you tackling the need to have better models instead of the need to either have better models that are integrated with how people are managing it. Like to me that would be a very interesting question or how is it that you can create, to really tackle this social ecological aspect, the social part of it and the political part of it that seems to, just from the film, that seems to be where the problem is. Right, okay. So speaking of storage and such things you have completely exceeded the capacity of my bread to remember your questions. So let me just address what I can remember. So the questions of improving the management part of the models are critical. That's, we have to do that. So I mean you said why do you care about this? How much water we have? Shouldn't we be thinking about different management strategies? So that was my interpretation of your comment. And so I agree with that and that's part of what needs to be done. Absolutely. But the core question was, why worry about how much water is there? Well so that's a fundamental question and let's just use the bank account and writing checks. I mean do you really want to just keep writing checks on a bank account and not know what the balance is? Right, so that would be we don't do that, right? If you're doing that at home I urge you to not do that. And so the reason we've been able to get away with it with water is because some of our aquifers are quite large and so we haven't had any problems. But now we're starting to face those problems. So to know how long it will be before we're in trouble you have to know just like with the bank account. Is there like a million dollars in your account or is there a thousand dollars in your account? There's a big difference. And some of our accounts have a million dollars and some of our accounts have a thousand and some have a hundred. And we need to start getting a handle on that. Wait I wanted to get back to your question because you are sort of first out of the box. But I forgot it, but it was good. Can we really call water a renewable resource? Yeah okay, so also an excellent question and so there's a renewable part of it and that's the part that sort of the precipitation and the evaporation and that's the difference between the precipitation and the evaporation is what's stored in river discharge. And so a lot of people look at that because we have this annual cycle, you know water cycle is always moving and so it's got this difference between precipitation and evaporation and they think of that as the renewable part and also the part that maybe recharges the groundwater. So I suppose if we, although this is wrong now that I think about it, but people define sustainability as using just that part, right? The precipitation minus, just think of it as river discharge and groundwater recharge because if you're only using groundwater recharge then you're really not affecting the total amount. That's sort of the idea, okay? And I guess people think that if we just use stream flow well that's fine too, okay? Because it's gonna be renewable, it's gonna keep raining. So here's the problem with that. Would you say that there would be value to having a continuum of renewability and showing that there are certain practices that are both more renewable than others? Well, yeah, sounds good. Right? Yeah, that sounds good. It sounds like a project for you again. Yeah, sure. I mean probably we've talked about it in different ways, but no, I think it sounds like a great idea, right? I mean just knowing how much we're using and yeah, that's very interesting. I mean it sort of relates to water footprint thing but putting it in the context of renewability and sort of like fraction of what's available. It's pretty good. Good job. You've been boots on the ground talking with climate deniers for a long time. They're fun. What I'm very interested in on how to sell climate change, communication and how everyone here could take away lessons learned on how to deal with people who are of different minds than the science that you may give them or fact. Right. What do you recommend or what are your lessons learned from your experience? So it's two parts and one is the water part can actually be separated from climate change part and becomes an easier sell and that's exactly the experience that I had with the testimony the other day. And so there were plenty of Democrats literally on one side and plenty of Republicans literally on the other side but with water, even though I talk about climate change and climate change impacts and the future of water availability, you don't really have to do that to convince people that there are water issues because water issues are pretty much in our face, right? And so we know that if we don't treat the water properly we're gonna get sick and we see it. And we know that if we have a farm in the Central Valley that the water table is dropping because the wells are going dry, right? We sense it, we see it and it's hard and both that's a bipartisan thing. So the water side, parts of the water side are easier sell. The climate change stuff, unfortunately in the United States, it's become quite the political, it's completely politicized. And I guess my fallback is, it's a two-part fallback. The rest of the world isn't really like the United States. So I mean, we travel all over the place for our research and some countries are just doing so much more with climate change all over Europe. People are just, we're, in many ways, we're way behind. But for me the fallback is always pointing out the things that are happening that are obvious like the ice sheets melting, right? And the glacier. So it's pointing to the thawing of the frozen part of the world. It's well documented, it's undeniable, sea level is rising. And so that stuff, you cannot, I mean, people who are trying to inject skepticism are shooting off a lot of hot air because it's happening and it's well measured and the uncertainty is next to zero. So that's what I fall back on. It's not like you, you know, you may, it's very difficult to convince people of that but that's my fallback. So the other thing is, you know, I think that it's sometimes when people rely on belief systems rather than science, it's difficult and it's a challenge to engage and you have to be prepared for a fight when you have discussions with fanatics. And I, you know, there was someone in the testimony we gave the other day, if you watched the whole thing, I think it's on our Facebook. Website, so how do they find that whole testimony on our website? It's on UCCHM.org and then you go on the website. Oh, on our website, I was thinking the Facebook page. So it's under what? It's under events. Okay, so UCCHM.org and then there's an events part of the website. So go in there and watch the testimony and you'll see the Republicans trying to engage and my strategy, as my daughter used to say, like ignore, I just ignored it and I answered the parts that I could answer. And so someone who tried to bait me into the models and how the models are garbage in, garbage out, which they are. But we're trying to make them better. We're trying to put in, make them more and more realistic. So I just, you know, didn't take the bait. Other people were posturing about climate change and how it's not happening and quoting the IPCC and saying the increasing frequency of flooding and drought isn't happening and we're not seeing it. You know, I just ignored it and focused on the things that I could engage and wanted to engage on which are more things like diesel and groundwater recycling. Yes? I actually have a question about the diesel. I'm not very familiar with sort of what you do, but I recently heard about many projects even here in Southern California for diesel facilities. Yes. And I just wonder what's your take on that? Okay, so there are some places, so I think that diesel is part of, so it has its issues and so that needs to be stated first. And the issues with diesel are that it's very energy intensive, right? So that you may really not be, when you think about the net global environment, you may not be helping anything because it takes so much energy that you burn a lot of fossil fuels and so you're contributing to global warming, which is driving a lot of the water problems. So it's energy intensive, so that's one part. And then the byproduct is a very concentrated, it's the salt, it's a very concentrated brine and so you have to do something with it. And in coastal areas, we inject it into the ocean whether that's good or bad, I don't know. And then on the ground, you have to, you know, bury it somewhere. And as someone said in the movie, it's not quite as bad as nuclear waste, but it's close. So those are the issues. Now that being said, I don't think that we can really rule anything out. And I think with diesel, I think that we have, so I think it's an important part of our future. And in some parts of the world, it's the only thing that can really be done or it's way too important. Communities that are close to the ocean, it can be cost effective because you don't have to transport the ocean water inland, water's really very heavy and so it's very expensive to move. I think that the membrane, the reason that the energy costs are so high is that you have to push the water through a membrane to sort of filter out the salt and that takes a lot of energy to push that through. That's the reverse osmosis. The membranes serve the filters. That technology is improving a lot so that it may require less energy. Another thing that could be done, and it was part of the planet in Australia where they recently built four national desal plants is to use as much renewable energy as you can, so wind and solar and so on. So that's it, the jury's out. And I think in the long term, I think that it will be viable and we just need to find solutions for what to do with the brines. I think the energy part can come down. We can handle that. I think the brines will figure out what to do. And could be a thing to be charged sort of is it internationally funded or? I don't know. Yeah, and I think there's good. I think there's, right, right. I think there's reasons for doing all of that and I don't have the answer to that. In this relation I'm from Barbados. We do have desal plant in Barbados because we're a waters pierced country. I mean, I know that we're in the band where it's looking all blue. Yes. That actually worries me because we're very heavily cultivated. So to me that means topsoil loss. If you're flooded, we're gonna lose a lot of topsoil. But my question had something more to do with in terms of the particular technology that's used for desalination is reverse osmosis. But I've been wondering for some time why perhaps we've not been looking into distillation methods using solar thermal or something like that. Yeah, sure. Because there was a researcher at the University of West Indies gave the campus a man named Oliver Emily who has sits day that actually built solar stoves on the campus and it was in white demonstration particularly when we had the 1924 conference on small ever-developing states. And it's puzzled as to why considering that you've done solar thermal with molten salt and all sorts of stuff, why haven't we reached out to those types of technologies or applications? So first let me say that I think that your accent is super cool. And again, I don't ever want to pretend to have all the answers and I don't have the answer to that one except to say that it may just be that it's not gonna produce enough. It just may not produce enough. That could be the only thing standing in its way because otherwise it's great, right? So, but it may be, you know, we may see and we see this in a lot in the developing world. So here's the problem. If we start to break up the water supply issue and take it from say a municipal one to a house by house one I mean, there's a lot of water that can be trapped on your property and all that but the problem becomes one of treatment. And so that's why we've kind of grown up with this centralized treatment idea. And it's one that, I mean, it's had huge impacts on human health. So, you know, it's a balance but I guess the answer is it probably just doesn't produce enough. Although it's great and it may be something that could be practiced individually or practiced for your garden, right? Or if you really want to wash your car which I never do and I use water, saving water as conserving water as the prime excuse for why I always tell my wife that I'm not going to wash the car. Maybe it's not directly connected with what you said but I think it's very typical. In Central Asia we have also problems with water and the main problem I guess is that the countries that have water they try to manipulate the countries they don't have it. And what do you think is just your opinion? What can be done by maybe these countries or governments of these countries to protect the population, to make maybe some preventive actions? What can be done? Yeah, so water has been a source of conflict forever. Yeah, forever. And I think the challenge is to find like-minded individuals. So did you see the movie? Did you get to see it? So there's a part of the end like I was asking about the Friends of the Middle East. And so they're very hopeful that water can be a source of collaboration rather than a source of conflict. I think it may come down to individuals. It really might. So today I got an email about, I don't know if I mentioned this in our group meeting before if I mentioned it to you guys, but right after the testimony, I got an email about a bipartisan Senate committee on water basically talking about these issues. We have to stop fighting about, and we're just talking about internal United States, but we have to stop fighting. They're talking about Republicans versus Democrats or two parties here in the US. We have to stop fighting. We agree that we need water and it's a shared resource. It's a super tough, it's a super tough problem and I think it comes down to individuals and I think it comes down to commitment of the individuals in the countries that are involved. It has to be, it has to be made a priority because otherwise I don't think it will happen. That question, I see, well this place has so many good people like you and many other ones that are here that I didn't go running every morning and they are putting water to both. No. All these trees in the center and all the parks and all that. I don't know what you're talking about. It's incredible. So is that yours? So important. Well, look around here. Look out the window, right? Look out the window. No, no, but not here. No, here. I mean, we do the same thing here. I mean, this takes a ton of water. I'm agreeing. Yeah, I'm agreeing with you. So maybe and can't you do something maybe they can't give to you because he's back to the lodge. Yes, really. Well, because you're saying from the beginning in that you are already doing it. OK, so it's a cultural shift. That's, I think, the biggest thing. And it's really hard to change people's lifestyles and people's personal preferences. And so here in the United States and maybe a lot of places around the world, most people think that you should have a green lawn and a lushly landscaped home. And that's a cultural thing. And people are shifting away from that, but it's slow. Certainly, Irvine grew up in the 60s and the 70s in the university as well in a time where we really weren't thinking that much about water availability. And so that's why it looks like it does around here. We have to move away from that. I mean, obviously we have to shift to native vegetation and low water use practices. As a scientist, so I could quit my job and become an advocate, but I'd rather not do that. And so I kind of draw the line at we do our research. We build the best tools that are possible. And in terms of effecting change, well, I do things like write this stuff, which is very public, but also try to be non-confrontational. Because I think that it's important that as a messenger, I need to, me personally, I want to have a strong tie to the science and not be viewed as someone who has a lot of hot air and just talking all the time. So I want my suggestions and the things that we find to be science-based. And I would prefer to, say, in working with the government, working with the water managers in California, to just present options to say, this is what's happening. Show them our California work. Show them what's happening in Southern California. And say, this is what we see. This is what our models project. And here are some science-based options. I just want you guys to have the best available science. No, but I refer just one minute, please, that the people who get profits, that they have you near. Because you are already doing maybe more than a person can do. And you are giving all your time and everything goes for strength. My nickname, uh. But the students from here should get the profit. I think it's their work. That they have you near. So they should say, OK, we are the ones who use these parts. We don't want grass. So they ask for your face or a message of you that we have him that he supports us. And in that sense, it's not that you have to do more. No. Right, no, I understand. But people here should use you and that they have you near as a face. You people are welcome to use me. They should say, we are the ones who use these parts. We don't want grass. No, but I'm talking to them. Well, but you know, your point is well taken. Because it's, you know, that's what you need. You need grassroots. You need people to come together and say, we don't want that. And that's a good point. So I mean, we pride ourselves on our beautiful parks here at Irvine. But if the community came together and said, hey, we don't need to have 20 soccer fields, 10 would be fine. Why don't we turn this one into a succulent garden or something like that? Or the center of the streets. Today I saw the cars that throw a lot of water to the center of the street that has grass. Maybe we don't need grass in the middle of the street. See, this is what happens when visitors come to the United States. They realize how crazy we are. You're right. You're right. We realize it at our country because not you, but they go to our country and do these things. Yeah, I know it. But you're right. And so I think that your point is a good one, especially for the people from the United States or from other countries that do this kind of stuff. When people from the outside come in, they are able to point out our craziness. And we're used to it here. And that's kind of the cultural shift I'm talking about. We've grown up with all this water. We haven't had to make any sacrifices. And it's hard to get people, first of all, to realize there's a problem. And then to take the next step, to think about saving water. It's really challenging. But I appreciate your comments. Is there a question? So as someone who's kind of from academia, you know I have wanted to be an advocate. And it's fun, I guess. But one of the things that I've noticed is we don't have enough people in academia participating. There's a disconnect between the people with the, I don't want to say information. Because the way I look at it, there's information. There's education. And then there's wisdom. And it's just kind of this upward trend. But the people who are so wise, obviously, you have a tremendous amount of not just information. But you know how to interpret that information. People like Scott Bollins, who spoke this morning, and all the tremendous respect for which I'm not your advisor. These people are not just informed, but they take the time to actually make these decisions. But how can we get academia to become more of a participant in this process? Because we have the challenge that I face is that we're people aren't short on information, but they're short on wisdom and education. How can we get academia to be more open to participating in that interpretive process? Amazing research that ends up just kind of maybe after seven or eight years, it might somewhat start to penetrate some kind of. Yeah, and sometimes longer. And it's even longer, like in my field, where we build tools, and we build computer models. But to get an operational office like the National Weather Service to adopt our stuff could take decades. It could take decades. So like several of the questions that I've answered today, I think there's two parts to answer to your question. So one is it's very difficult to get academics to care about communication. And the biggest reason, well, there's a couple of reasons. We're not rewarded for it. We don't get any. The only thing we're rewarded for is writing another paper. You're almost penalized for it. Yeah, right. And in fact, some people actually think it's too soft and whatever. I mean, I don't care anymore because I'm getting older. And I really feel compelled to share the message about, this is important to me, so I do it. Yeah, a lot of people don't do it. And one of the reasons is that we're not rewarded for it. So there are so many people that just want to keep doing what they're doing. I think by nature, we're shy as well. I mean, that's why a lot of us go into academics, maybe not shy when we teach. But a lot of us just like to sit there with a computer, with a pad and a pencil and do stuff. Let's just say maybe socially challenged is a better way to do it, but not shy. Socially challenged. But like in this arena that's sort of on the fray, I mean, basically I do climate change research. I said we can separate it a little bit, but our focus is really on climate change impacts on water availability. And so we're real targets. And there are a lot of people that don't want to put themselves in the spotlight because the climate deniers are out there. And they are super organized, super organized. And the more I talk about this kind of stuff, the more I will become a target. So that's another reason why I just try to keep my comments very science-based as minimally controversial as possible and still get the message up. This is what we see. The models aren't good enough to reproduce this. We need to be able to tackle this problem in a technologically advanced way that can help our country. And that's kind of where I leave it. But we're targets. How you can take him home with you is we'll have this up in a few days. Will please introduce yourself if you had your hand up. Didn't you have a question? Comment. He's got a group of colleagues who are very effective in communicating. So we'll work with them so you can get the linkages. And hopefully, Juliana will put them on the web page so you can actually get his congressional testimony. The movie, we'll go see next year. She said in 16 months, it'll still be on this form. So hopefully, he's in town third week in July. Up in the calendar. So we can see how much things are better, which, of course, we know they're not. So we're going to take, after thanking him, that's my phone. A stretch break of five minutes. And we'll take the longer break after our next program. So join me in thanking him for more.