 I'm Carol Christ, I'm the Chancellor of UC Berkeley. Welcome to the first of this year's 111th annual Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures. For more than a century, Berkeley's Academic Senate has singled out distinguished members of our faculty whose research has changed the trajectory of their disciplines and of our understanding of the subject they've dedicated their careers to. These lectures shine a light on an essential part of our mission which is creating new knowledge. The curiosity and the creativity that fuel the quest to learn and understand are at the heart of our commitment to making the world a better place. So what we through what we discover, what we teach and the public service we provide. This year's lectures represent the continuation of a treasured tradition that is recurred annually with one exception. In the wake of World War I and the influenza pandemic, the faculty research lectures were suspended in 1919. In 2020, when virtual events were in vogue and Zoom kept us together, the lectures went on. Being selected to deliver a faculty research lecture is rightfully seen as a high honor. The peers who exemplify academic excellence is no small feat. For students, members of the campus community and the public, this is a wonderful way of experiencing scholarly research of the highest caliber. I'd like now to welcome the past recipients who are with us today. Professors, please stand when I read your name and let's hold our applause until everyone has been recognized. Walter Alvarez, Bill Dietrich, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Haas, Barbara Romanois, Montgomery Slotkin and Marty Jay. Please give them a round of applause. The two individuals chosen to give this year's faculty research lectures are Inez Fung and Michael Nyland who is presenting in May. Inez is a professor of Earth and Planetary Science and of Environmental Science Policy and Management. She models the processes that maintain and alter the composition of the atmosphere and as a consequence, the climate. Dr. Fung received degrees in applied mathematics and meteorology from MIT and was the founding director of the Berkeley Center for Atmospheric Sciences. She's the subject of Forecast Earth, part of a series of books on women scientists for middle schoolers that was launched by the National Academy of Sciences. She was also featured in a YouTube video sponsored by Wired Magazine called What Could Happen in a World That's Four Degrees Warmer. This is in addition to her multitudinous scientific publications. Please join me in welcoming Professor Inez Fung whose lecture is titled On the CO2 Trail. Thank you. Thank you so very, very much for this great honor. CO2, I don't think I need to introduce people to CO2. This is a familiar figure, the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. I put in lines, this is when I arrived at Berkeley in 1998 and CO2 and you can see how much the CO2 has increased in the last 25 years. So CO2 of course is a climate problem, but CO2 always travels, CO2 always has a body called water. Okay, so when we have some warming from the CO2, then there's increased evaporation from the ocean. And so that enhances, okay, this is what we do in freshman class, so CO2 does this, okay, at the right wavelength, okay, and water can do more, okay, then more water and they get more excited and then they bump into the nitrogen and oxygen. So here then with the body, water vapor, then there's an additional warming from the water vapor and similarly, melting snow and ice, the surface is darker and so that absorbs more sunlight and so that also amplifies the warming. We used to call this positive feedback and positive is something you want and so this is not, okay, so where the dial is, is in the clouds, okay, so if we have more clouds, if that low clouds, they reflect sunlight and so it will be cooling, I'm from the tropics, we like cumulonimbus clouds, so they radiate out at a cooler temperature, colder temperature, so they could, there would be less, there would be warming. So here CO2 always travels with water. So when we look at the CO2 increase, this is a figure of the global fossil fuel emission, you can see the steady trend. So we have OPEC here of Iran, change of regime in Iran, dissolution of the Soviet Union and then the financial crisis and the COVID pandemic. So even though we have changed our driving habits, we have the economy slowed down, you can see the recovery, that is a minor dip, okay, we still, even though we're not driving, we're still consuming food, we are still heating our houses using our computers, et cetera. So when we look at the increase, the top, the green is the fossil fuel in CO2 and the blue is what is in the atmosphere. So you can see the green part has gone somewhere, okay, there's no way to go on that time scale except the land and the ocean. So early on in my career, I use the atmosphere, I'm a atmospheric scientist, okay, so then you can see at Monalua, the CO2 is higher than that at South Pole. So we have data since 1957, the International Geophysical Year. So it's always about 1% higher, okay, so Monalua is always higher because the atmosphere mixes. So the mixing time is about one year. So when we do the model and say, if I put in fossil fuel CO2, then the gradient, the hemispheric gradient is too large. So the only way to explain the observed hemispheric gradient, given there are observations over the land, is to put it, over the ocean, is to put it on land. Man, that was difficult. People didn't like that. Okay, but here now, many decades later, we have enough observations so that we can say that the atmosphere takes about approximately 50% and the land and ocean 25% is fairly democratic. But what is interesting here to me is that the little red bars, okay, so these are El Nino years. So some El Nino years, the hemispheric increase is very small and the land and ocean take up a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere, whereas other years is the opposite. So the question is, when the climate continues to warm, what would happen? So when I came to Berkeley, I was serving on the International Geosphere Biosphere Program and we thought that it was time to have a joint project with the world climate research program. So basically the fluid dynamicists and the physicists on one side and the biogeochemists, the chemists and the biologists on the other side. So I had the shortest flight, if that could be said, from here to Melbourne to meet with the climate modeling guys on the weekend. And so after much back and forth, we proposed, they agreed that this would be what we do. So we specify fossil fuel in the, instead of specifying CO2 increase in the atmosphere, which is what had been what we were doing before, we specify the fossil fuel into the atmosphere, we put in the ocean carbon and the interactive land carbon and let the atmosphere take the residual, okay? So I call this, we call it because it's never been done before, I call that the flying leap experiment and our password was splat. So here, so it's not respectable. So now it's called the, it's now called the couple carbon cycle climate model in the comparison, C4-MIP, okay? But I still think of it as flying leap. Okay, so splat, here we go, splat. So here we had many models, we had the same fossil fuel emission and BYO-M means bring your own model, okay? So it was the first one we did, okay? So you can see here between, this is the difference, okay? When we had, instead of just doing carbon cycle the same climate, we put in the climate and carbon to interact and evolve together and this is the difference, okay? So you can see the difference is huge. All models say that when we put in, when we have the interaction between the changing climate, then there's more CO2 in the atmosphere, okay? We call that the warming feeds the warming, okay? But the difference here is that Peter Cox with the Hadley Center model and he, his model was very, I call that the prima donna model, okay? Very excited hydrologic cycle. So he had droughts in the Amazon and he killed all the trees and then immediately there's decomposition and so he had a high CO2 whereas I'm on the other end. My trees suffered quietly. Okay, so the thing is why is, this is huge, okay? 300 parts per million is huge, okay? And this is just the feedback. So when I look at my model you can just look at the, when I look at my own calculation you can see the red part. This is the correlation between temperature and soil moisture, okay? So in the tropics it's green, it's negative. That means that when it is warmer the tropic gets drier and at high latitudes in the winter and somewhat in the summer when it is warmer the soil is wetter, okay? So with the Hadley Center model, the prima donna model they collapse the rainforest to kill all the trees, okay? And mine was there. So, you know, you can see I'm competitive. I'm going after Peter Cox, okay? But the thing is here, soil moisture, you can look at this, this is old time, okay? This is a while ago from the last century. So you can see from the model projection the stippling is 80% of the models agree in sign, okay? So yes, we have wetter tropics and here may be drying and wetter in the high latitudes but you look at soil moisture, we don't really agree, okay? We don't, and forget about runoff, okay? Evaporation, yes, when it is warmer my laundry dries faster, okay? So yes, we agree on evaporation. So what do I do, okay? I want to give myself an A and I want to fuck up Peter Cox. So what we did was make a proposal for a new measurement program. And so this is to the CAC Foundation. And every time I look at this, I'm so grateful that we were selected, okay? So we wrote that precipitation in stream flow represent the excess water that the atmosphere and soils cannot hold. So measurement of these surpluses do not tell us anything about the processes, okay? And then Jim Kirchner, who was part of the whole team wrote that using the today's hydrologic measurement tools is comparable to listening to a Beethoven symphony but hearing a note every minute, okay? So what we're doing is, we were grateful we were selected, is that we had, so we started a project, hydro watch at the Eel River watershed at the Angelo Coast Range Reserve, Mary Power who's here is the faculty director and Bill Dietrich who's here, he's been working there. And I want to say right now I am a couch potato, I don't, I'm afraid of heights, okay? So you don't see me in the field very often but here you can see here close to Mendocino Coast. Okay, so we have the hydro watch and so it's on a steep, very steep terrain. And you can see here from Bill Dietrich's, the laser mapping, here's the topography and Bill Dietrich called it Rivendell, okay? So many of you know Rivendell. So here's the creek, this is the Lidar image with the creek, okay? So here, Jim Bishop took these pictures. So here's the creek at the bottom, there's water samplers and I want you to see the ladders that go up, okay? You don't see any pictures of me on the ladders and so keep going up and up. And here is the scary part, you come up this ladder, you walk along here and you can see the other ladder here, okay? And then once you get on the other ladder, you have to walk like this and then more ladders, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so what we did was at this site and this is new at the time. Okay, 4,000 square meters, we put in and I counted and Bill probably can tell me a different number, but over 1,000 sensors, okay, at this site. We put it on Wi-Fi backbone, okay? And we put in our own solar panels and we set up a data system, okay? So that the sensors will monitor everything, the soil moisture, the sap flow, the chemistry in the water, the rain gauge, and then the well, the water table, et cetera, okay? All of that will come, will beam home every day, okay? So we can see the, we can see the data. So at the time, this is new. So here I'm gonna start talking about the sap velocity data. This is together, I want to say again, I don't do any fieldwork. So this is with Todd Dawson teaching student, teaching student Percy Link. And so you can see here the, you put a probe into the tree and so the middle probe sends out a heat pulse. And so when the water goes through, you can tell the temperature difference and you can see how fast the water's going. So then, so this is, so Percy Link, I mean, it's too dark, but you can see Percy here. So we started with evergreen species, Douglas fir, bay, life oak, et cetera. And so here is the creek and here's the slope going up. And so what we, so we expect that all these are evergreen trees that they have the same seasonal cycle. They transpire, they take water at the same time. And so we have 25 trees, 53 sensors. And we have multi-year, four or so years, three years here of 30 minute frequency data, okay? All beamed home at real time. So I don't need to go through California's summer, dry summer, wet winter, and intermediate seasons. So when we look at the sap velocities, then what you see here, the Douglas firs, okay, have a slow decline during the dry summer and then as soon as the rains come, here we are, okay? The sap velocity picks up. Madrones are very strange. They have their maximum transpiration in the dry summer, okay? And then a slow ramp up, okay, and slow decline and life oak is what I'm saying, steady up, steady increase and steady decrease during the seasons. So the madrone during COVID, we were stuck at Friday Harbor and I walked around every day. So now I understand why madrones do that. They leave the lifetime of the leaves 14 months and they overlap, okay? So you can see here the old leaves here and the new leaves and then they have flowers and that's when all the transpiration, all the water use happens. So then we decided to continue and so Aaron Belize PhD thesis, we only did madrones in the dry summer. So this is California dry summer but we did them on the North Slope and the South Slope. Okay, North Slope. So you can't see the, I don't think you can see the difference but you can see the transpiration between the two slopes. And what was the surprise here is that during the dry summer, the South Slope trees transpire more water than the North Slope trees, okay? We checked, it's just not, you know, everything we checked. So this is not an artifact of anything and so we had several summers. And so our hypothesis here, now this is getting into a little bit of science fiction on my part, is that the North Slope, we call the North Slope trees are profligate water users. Okay, they don't have enough sunlight, okay? So when there's sunlight, they have a lot of water, okay? So then they can use, they don't care, okay? As soon as there's sunlight, okay, whereas the South Slope trees in the North, so hot and dry and so they are, they're much more efficient water users, okay? But this raises the issue when I'm thinking about climate, about adaptation, okay? Why do some trees, this is the same tree species. You can take a look at them and they look the same, okay? But why are they doing, so they have adapted to the new environment. So where do the trees come from, get their water? So this is Bill Dietrich's photo, so we drilled wells to access the groundwater. So here you can see on the slope, I showed you, we drilled this mixed Swiss cheese out of the hill slope. So we have wells and this is going up the slope and I'm gonna show you some data of the wells and the well number increases up slope, okay? So here you can see the date, you can see the data here. Rain on top is the rain. So here the colors, well one is this one and well 10 the red guy is here and note that the depth of the water table is 20 meters, 20 meters down, okay? So here you can see not the well by the creek but the other guys when it rains, okay? The water table goes up by a meter or so or more, okay? And then there's slow drainage in the summer and then the winter rains come. So what does that tell you? It is not a slow percolation of water through, okay? There's secret passages here, okay? Fractures in the bedrock. And so all years we see that. And so what Mikhail did was to do a mathematical model of hydraulic conductivity. The crucial thing here, you can't see this, is that we make the variants dependent on the soil moisture, on the rock moisture itself. So when the soil, when the column is soil column, the rock column is filled with water and then the variance is zero. When it is dry, okay? Then there are many choices to go. The water has many options, okay? So then the variance is large. And so you can see here the modeling of this. And so you can see how the water comes down, okay? So when we have the fractures, when we have that, and this is 20 meters down, okay? So you can imagine when it rains, the water goes, I kept saying secret passages, okay? The fractures where the water goes down. And the way it is done is that when it is wetter, it is easier for the water to go down. So you can see here it's not too bad, okay? Here's the red is the observed water table. We're pretty good on that. I won't show you the whole, I won't have time to show you the whole movie. But you can see the entire record having fractures and having, oops, excess. So what Bill Dietrich calls rock moisture when we integrate over the column is about 30% above the water table. 30% of the water is in the rocks. When we do a sensitivity calculation about how plants excess that water, then it's always the little, so when you have plant roots that are like 10 meters deep, most of the mass is in the upper four meters, 90% of the mass is in the upper four meters and it's the little bit below that can excess the rock moisture, okay? So it's always the little guy that that's all the work. Okay, so now I go to the California drought, okay? So when we come back to the well data, then what we see is that during the drought, this period, the drought period, there's no evidence in any, if you look at the water table, you don't think that there's a drought, okay? Only in the precipitation that we know there's a drought. So since I'm still after Peter Cox in his model where he killed trees, okay? That's why I'm going this way. So what I did was I mapped the forest, the US forestry inventory, the FIA database. So it's required by law, the Department of Agriculture's required by law in 1990 something to measure every tree in the USA, okay? So then they have not every tree, but then they have a protocol of how to sample the tree, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, okay? And so the data about the tree size, tree height and then there could be some information about the mortality. This came in for California, came in 50 spreadsheets. Anyway, so here are the forests. So for California, for the period, so the data actually started in 2000, so the survey, not all the trees, but the tree surveyed about 330,000, 98 tree species in California. So when I map them according to species, you cannot, so here, you know, it's all familiar to all your hikers, right? That the Douglas first in the coast and there's some up in the Sears, the ponderosa pine here, the incense cedar, okay? They're different habitats for different tree species. But when I look at the FIA database and the mortality of the different tree species, and here I put in the reference period because I don't have time, you know, the data's only started in 2000, so I picked a period that is sort of normal precipitation, sort of, and so then you can see the difference that during the drought, which is in the red, that the tree mortality is higher for every tree species. Okay, some already there's even in the reference, what I call the reference period, high mortality, but this drought and increase the mortality fraction. So, but when I go, since I'm a meteorologist, okay, you look at all the heat, okay, whatever heat index, moisture deficit index, anything. Yes, when there's in hot and dry, some trees die, but I cannot explain the differential mortality across all the tree species. So, so I got stuck, and so I'm really grateful to Nick, who is down the hall from me, Nick Swanson-Hicel, and he pointed me to the geologic map of California. Geology is something I've always been afraid of, so thank you, Nick. You need to spell, okay, so, so, so here you can see the different rock types, but at the end of the day, we grouped them into sedimentary rock, okay, porous rock and volcanic rock and plutonic rock, and Nick told me, helped me to think plutonic rock is like my kitchen counter, okay, not very porous, whereas here the volcanic rocks, here the volcanic rocks, there's an aquifer underneath, so it's very porous rock compared to the sedimentary rocks. So, when I do the same eight tree species, same in the same location, plotted in the same location, there's a reason why I did that, you can see the trees in the top row are more, they're more of them on sedimentary rock, this is sedimentary rock, here's volcanic rock in the middle, plutonic rock here, these are more prevalent on sedimentary rocks, whereas the one in the lower, the bottom row are more prevalent on volcanic or plutonic rocks, okay, so guess how the mortality happens. So, when I look at the same thing, you have seen these figures before, then the trees on the sedimentary rocks are here and the mortality is low, okay, whereas these on the volcanic rocks or on the plutonic rocks, there's high mortality, okay. So, when I go and this is, I don't have data, so I have to go to the horticultural data to look at plant rooting system, okay, so the sedimentary Douglas fir on the coast, they have tap roots, they can tap into the rock moisture, whereas the other trees, the white fir, for example, have shallow roots, okay, so then it is really talking about which trees survive, which trees do well, part of it is rainfall, okay, but a lot of it is where they hang out and that is depending on the geology. So, this is tough to follow, but anyways, the same thing, so I map them, so the circle is the size, so just take a look at this, so this axis is precipitation anomaly, so to the left is drier, and so this is, up is more greater mortality, and so this is for sedimentary rock, plutonic rock in red and volcanic rock in blue, so what you would expect without looking at all of that is that you know, before I looked at the geology, is that here drier is to the left and mortality is higher mortality, I would expect a trend like this, okay, that higher drier with greater mortality, but when I look at them species by species, it is a surprising result that it seems like, and I highlighted this, that the trees on volcanic rocks don't do so well. This is where I'm sort of trying to figure out where to go next, okay, so the hypothesis here is a Goldilocks problem, okay, so on volcanic rocks, the water goes through so fast and there's not, okay, whatever is there just runs away, so the trees don't have access to the water, and so on plutonic rocks, there's not much storage anyway, okay, so it's drier, so the best place is for the sedimentary rocks on the coast and you can see from the mortality, okay, but you know, I started with CO2 and the climate and all of that, why do I, why am I doing this, not just because I'm after Peter Cox, but the question is, the question is, you know, we talk about a forestation as a climate mitigation strategy, it's not just planting trees, okay, what trees do we plant, where do we plant them, where is the water and who can have access to that secret compartment down there, okay, to access that water to survive the drought, okay, I think there's a lot of work to be done in that regard, and so when I look forward, okay, going back again to a forestation, then Abyssal's PhD thesis where we put in, we just say, okay, we're gonna plant trees everywhere at Milatitudes where trees are not, okay, so what happened there is that yes, it got darker, but where trees are not is where there is not enough water to have trees, okay, so what happened to the energy balance, the energy balance shifts, so instead of cooling, okay, this energy balance goes to sensible heat so it warms up the entire northern hemisphere, right, because we planted, nobody would do that, okay, but this is a warning, when we did it at High Latitudes, when we planted trees at High Latitudes, because the High Latitudes, there's very little water vapor, so then the transpiration from the trees enhanced the greenhouse effect, okay, and so we melted the sea ice, we have more evaporation from the open ocean, and so there's a feedback, okay, so yes, planting trees is always good, okay, I want to say that, planting trees is always good, but as a climate mitigation effort, then we have to remember that there's always transpiration, okay, CO2 always travels with the body water, okay, so there's always transpiration, and so there could be warming, okay, so it could be a local strategy where we have enough water on timescales of years, but it's not a long-term solution, okay, because ecosystems saturate, okay, high school kids grow, you feed them, you grow, okay, and then there's a steady state where the input is equal to the output, the photosynthesis is balanced by the decomposition and you're not sequestering carbon anymore, so where are we, okay, so in the global scale, okay, I said up for a station is not a solution, it's not a global solution, it could be a local temporary band-aid, it's always good for other reasons, so here is where we are in the USA in terms of net greenhouse gas emissions. President Biden has set a target for net zero by 2050, okay, so here is what we have, so this is, forget about this, this is the previous administration, so this is the target for the US at the United Nations Conference of Parties, so this is our nationally determined contribution, and so with the President Biden has put in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Climate Bill there, there's a lot of funding for technology to reduce emissions from the oil and gas, from the oil and gas sector, and funding for agriculture to have climate smart agriculture, et cetera, et cetera, and so here is the goal, this is what the President's policies so far have done, and here we have the, if we include what EPA is proposing and what the proposals on the table and state efforts and local efforts that there is a chance that we can meet the target that we promised, so what I've done in the last year, two years, I'm a member of President Biden's Council of Advices on Science and Technology, and this is what I worked on for the last long time, and especially over Christmas here, so this is, so it's one thing for the President to put out a lot of money to take the transition to out of fossil fuel to renewable energy, and it is great that everyone promises to do, yes, we will reduce this and that, so but how do we know, okay, how do we know it's something that we've never done before, how do we know this is, what is the best way to reduce, what is the most effective way, what is the best way to use the money, okay, and how do we invest, okay, the inflation reduction act money is for 10 years, how do we go beyond that, how do we put in the observations, the satellite observations, the ground-based observations, you don't need to read all the recommendations, so we wrote a proposal, so we wrote the report, I've never done a report that starts with Dear Mr. President, but anyway, so we wrote a report and so basically a lot, you cannot do policy, you cannot do without the data, okay, so here we are advocating, recommending that we have wide, not just atmospheric CO2 satellite data that can track small satellites and ground-based observations, more flux towers, et cetera, and healthy soils, okay, but to have the data to monitor everything, so I'll end here, it's very difficult, this is the most difficult slide for me because it has been such a pleasure and privilege to be at Berkeley, when I came, it was a surprise to me since I was at NASA and at Columbia and other places before that there are women in leadership positions, I was not the only one, nobody's there, well, anyway, and there are people from all around the world and so I felt like I belonged and then I'm also grateful to all my colleagues here who have led me into new territories, who have answered questions and taken my students to teach them and teach me new things, so it's been very exciting thing for me and this honor, I cannot thank you enough, so this is, I think we're at an exciting time in terms of the climate that we are actually, you know, the stone age ended not because we ran out of stone, so it's time for us to move, okay, out of the fossil fuel era, okay, into something, into a renewable, into a new energy source, so thank you very much. Any questions for Professor Fung? Raymond. Thank you so much, you know, it's always great to hear your overview. I wonder on this last point, if you might like to opine on the relative roles of government versus the private sector in monitoring the planet in the future, looking forward, there's some hints of that and I wanted to give you a chance to elaborate more on everything from satellite observations to otherwise, how much can the private sector and even private citizens contribute to this? Thank you. Well, to start, I think that the future, all of us, we have to include everybody every way that we can do, so we are seeing small satellites from the private sector, from the state of California is supporting some small satellite measurements and that's in the private sector. And so, and NASA, obviously, we are familiar with the NASA satellite observations. The NASA satellites, the historical, and it's always available, okay, by decree, you can access all satellites that are NASA satellites and you can access the data every time they have an improvement in the calibration, they have an improvement, so you have a sense of the data quality. What we're talking about now with the private sector is that we are recommending in one of those recommendations is that we set up a metric for determining what is quality data, okay? It is important to recognize that regulatory data is not the same as scientific data because all they need is an exceedance, okay? They see a plume, okay? And they see a plume in the private sector. Satellite guys would say data latency is 90 days, okay? So that I could check my calibration and I can do my QAQC, but basically they have privates, they have a business model of which I respect, okay? That they have a business model, they have subscribers who want that data, okay? They want to turn off whatever is emitting before EPA comes to find them, okay? So there's a different model, but we are working to figure out the way to have a national, we're recommending, one of the things we're recommending is a national greenhouse gas center that would oversee all the agencies that would set up the standards, okay? So everybody could be included. And this includes not just the satellite data, but also ground-based data, okay? Now we call instead of top-down data and bottom-up data, we call atmospheric data and activity-based data, okay? So we are recommending not just the expansion, but what is also very important is the expansion of the measurements to disadvantaged communities. In the four corners, I forget how many, 40,000 wells, some large number of wells, a quarter of them are in San Juan County in New Mexico and the tribal people live within half a mile of a well. Okay, so you can imagine what happens to their health and in agricultural systems where we have concentrated agricultural feeding operations, it's not just the feeding, it's not just the methane from the cattle, but also the waste, okay? And the people living next to them. So we are recommending to the president not just the standard satellites, but also ground-based, including the people who are affected so that they have the data to advocate for themselves. That's a very long answer, yes? Yes, thank you. The last slide you're interested to make, of course, is us who will view that for how much you've been rich the campus in your presence here. Well, thank you. The question is, in your recommendation slides, I noticed that you focused a lot on methane. And I'm wondering, is that because we know the unknowns for CO2 and don't know the unknowns for methane? No, no, no, no, no, no. It is not that, the U.S. at COP 26, which is two years ago, the European Union and the U.S. have a global methane pledge. So methane, for molecule, is a much more, you know, it has, okay, it has more excited states. So the methane, it's a much more potent greenhouse gas, but also methane in the atmosphere reacts with OH to form CO2 and water vapor. And so the lifetime is 10 years. So the idea is that the CO2, we are not yet ready to have things at scale to get rid of fossil fuels. We will be dependent on fossil fuels for a while. Okay, so methane is, if you will, a band-aid. And the other thing is methane loss from the oil and gas industry, from the cattle industry, is money loss to the atmosphere. Okay, so it is easier to get a buy-in. So it's trying to say surgically, you know, what can we do, okay, while we work on the bigger problem, okay, and if you look at the Inflation Reduction Act, where the money's going, then there's the big problem, but there's an immediate thing that we can do, okay, to reduce the methane and the industries are on board. We have the satellites now flying in 2024. We will have two small satellites that will be measuring methane. And so in addition to the industries, the agricultural sector, et cetera, and oil and gas sector working on it, that's something that will buy us time. Yeah, there's a band-aid. Yeah. In the back. Hi, Inez, thanks for a good talk. So I'm one of Raymond's students, so I'm also an EPS with you. And I'm wondering if you are starting your PhD now with all this information and new technology, what would you work on, or what big questions would you go after? I would say for all the students, is to, your PhD now, especially at this marvelous school, is to build the base, okay? Take courses in anything, everything that's related to you, rather than, yes, there is, you have always the big question. But if you are so smart, you solve the big question, then what's next, okay? So the suggestion I tell all students is to build your base. Yes, you sort of in a certain direction, but build your base so that when problems change, you are flexible enough to pick up new things and address those new problems. I said I was trained in mathematics, and my PhD was in theoretical geophysical fluid dynamics. So going to the field is something I never thought I would do, and learning geology with all those big words was something I never thought I would do, but I'm really grateful to all my colleagues who would let me, who would teach me and have the patience to put up with my questions. So I think the important thing is that the problems, you're not just doing your PhD, you are preparing for the future, and I don't know where the problems are. Thank you so much for your great presentation. I was wondering, you talked a lot about groundwater aquifers and their importance in sustaining tree cover. Do we find that fossil fuel extraction techniques negatively affect that kind of Goldilocks zone you were talking about with groundwater retention? Yeah, I cannot answer that question yet. I've just started a new project on groundwater. So we are learning about groundwater is the next big problem in the same way. I worked on the climate models. I'm going to say 40 years ago, and I'm going to say everything that we worked on, we said 40 years ago is still valid. Okay, nobody listened to us, says, oh, physics, okay, who cares, right? So now the data are there. So we think that groundwater may be the same with the next big problem is the availability of fresh water, food security, and all those issues and what science we have to do now. I cannot answer your question yet, but I think the science is not totally there to understand the water and the pumping. And then it's not just that, say the Central Valley, there's the natural arsenic and in Kansas, there's the uranium, there's natural, okay? And that impacts, that's in the groundwater in addition to all the other, the nitrates and other stuff. So yes, groundwater is something that our next big problem, I mean, next big study will be on groundwater. Yeah, so I didn't know the state of Nebraska has 120,000 wells that drills into the Ocalala, aquifer, so if a Tuesday is with most wells, one is California, one is Nebraska, but California draws more water than Nebraska, so anyway. Thank you for the excellent talk. I'm wondering if you could reflect on a possibility that I don't have the technical expertise to assess, but our colleague, Eli Blanovich, proposed in PNAS last year that one way to get carbon out of the air is to sequester it agriculturally, like you mentioned that as soon as the plants reach adulthood, then they have to decay and all. His idea is to bury it underground in large durable plastic and make sure that it's desiccated so that even anaerobic bacteria don't and the plastic can stay like hundreds of years and so forth as a form of carbon sequestration that's like better than many of them. Does that seem plausible to you? Just generally, have you heard about this? I have heard about many strategies and that is one of them. Some of the strategies would put them in the sea, et cetera, but it's like taking aspirin or something, right? So I cannot see how it would be difficult to imagine how to deploy that at scale, okay? Ask the students how to take one PPM out of the atmosphere, okay? I don't know how to take one PPM out of the, you know? So there is no single silver bullet, okay? So it has to be everything working together, but the more important thing is not the removal but putting less into the atmosphere, okay? And so I think finally what I showed here is that we hope that with the Inflation Reduction Act and the activities that have stimulated that we will be working a lot more on the reduction of the input side, okay? So I'm not saying anything about, I'm for all strategies because we don't know which one would work and which one could be deployed at scale, yeah. I think we are out of time so I'm gonna pass the mic back to Chancellor Christ. Well, and thank you for the splendid lecture or thanks go to you for both your research and just, you know, this wonderful window into your research that you gave us today. So thank you very, very much. Thank you. And please come back to the next faculty research lecture. Thank you.