Rob:  Dr. Crawford, how tenuous are our water supplies?
Ken Crawford:  From the vantage point of the whole world, we’re living in a very tenuous era of human civilization.  I think that the world community at large is on the precipice of natural disasters caused by the lack of available fresh water.  In the United States, we’re a little better off, and in Oklahoma we’re even better off.  But, even here in central Oklahoma, we must keep our guard up, because there is no alternative to water.
Rob:  We have seen in localized regions, droughts.  Is that something we could see more of in the coming years?
Crawford:  I think we will see a return to drought periods, because that’s been our history.  We go into extended periods that are dry, and they become droughts.  We go into very wet periods.  We have had an unusually long wet period of the latter part of the 20th century.  The climatological record says we will go back into an extended period of dry weather.
Rob:  Can people lose their lives?
Crawford:  People will lose their livelihoods.  And then that may make them move elsewhere to keep their livelihoods up.  If you’re talking the U S, I think it’s unlikely that there will be American citizens that will die directly as a result of poor quality fresh water.  If we’re talking other parts of the world, third world countries, I’m confident that in my lifetime, and likely your lifetime, we’re going to see major calamities that will revolve around the lack of clean, accessible fresh water.
Rob:  Dr. McManus, what type of impact could climate change have on such a forcast?
Gary McManus:  Well, first we have to realize that the areas where there are, say, deserts and rainy seasons, wet, wet, wet periods, areas of rainforest, these are all controlled by our large scale weather patterns.  Air goes up in certain areas of the globe, air comes down.  So where the air comes down, that’s where our deserts are.  So when we have climate change, and we start changing these large scale air patterns, that will dictate changes in our precipitation patterns.  So it’s expected that, as the air warms it will go upwards at an increased velocity, but therefore it will also come towards the earth in these places where there are deserts with increased velocity.  So, you’ll have an intensification of desert areas.  But as those areas expand to the north and the south, that’s where we get our changes in precipitation patterns.  Oklahoma just happens to lie in an area across the globe where the great deserts of the world do reside.  Now, we have geographic patterns that allow us to get plenty of rainfall.  But as our jet stream travels to the north, towards the pole, that could impact our precipitation patterns by decreasing the chances to have storms go across the state that produce rainfall.  And so we could have a decrease in precipitation that way.  Just increasing our temperature will also impact our water supply, because as you increase temperature, you increase evaporation.  So, those are two ways that could be impacted, our precipitation could be impacted, as we downscale from a global scale problem.
Rob:  Is it fair to say that we shouldn’t judge our next 50 years by our past 50 years in terms of water supply, and our weather?
McManus:  That’s exactly the truth.  What’s happened in the past, you can’t simply extrapolate towards the future.  Our last 30 years, as Dr. Crawford said, has been one of the wettest periods in Oklahoma’s history, at least our recorded history.  You probably shouldn’t expect that to continue just the way it has been.  Now as we see our mega droughts of the past, the dust bowl drought of the 30s, the mega drought of the 50s, you should expect something like that in the future.  But our long term period of rainfall that we’ve seen, a lot of our young people have grown up with, a lot of our state’s infrastructure has been built upon, it would be very dangerous to just assume that, that’s going to continue.  
Crawford:  And the reason that this is such a complex problem that we must wrestle with is, our water use patterns, per person, have gone up by a factor of four since I was a young person.  In Norman, Oklahoma, in the 60s, we were using about 35 to 40 gallons of water per day, on average, as a citizen.  Today, that use is up around 125 to 150 gallons of water per day, per citizen.  So, we’re demanding more of our water resources.  
Rob:  And why is that?  We have low-flow toilets.  We have showerheads that use less water.  It seems like we would be using less water these days.
Crawford:  When I was younger, I know very few people that had sprinkler systems that irrigated their yards.  Today, I know hundreds of people that irrigate their yards.  I’m not saying that, that’s bad.  I’m just saying that has contributed to our increase.  We didn’t have car washes 50 years ago.  We have them everywhere today; that’s, I’m all for that.  We just must realize that our demand on public water supplies has increased dramatically.  We have certain technologies, drilling for oil in parts of Oklahoma where they where they use millions of gallons of water to penetrate to deeper levels below ground.  We didn’t use to do it that way.
McManus:  And keep in mind that, Oklahoma has seen as Dr. Crawford said, periods of extended drought, ten-year periods of drought, decadal scale droughts in the past, the 30s, the 50s, even the teens.  The next mega drought that strikes Oklahoma is going to be a severe shock to the system.  The last severe drought we had was the drought of 2005, 2006, at least in the main body of the state.  We saw reservoir levels drop to near record levels across portions of the state.  That was a year to a year-and-a-half drought, consider if that drought had extended to another eight years.  What would have occurred to our water supply in differing towns across the state, some of these small towns?  I’m not just talking about the urban areas.  If a two-year drought caused water shortages, what would another eight years do, of water shortages, or of , or what would another eight years of drought done to that two-year period of drought?
Rob:  So something as similar as the 1930s or the 1950s could have even more severe consequences today.  Is that?
Crawford:  Much more severe in my opinion.  And the reason for it; let me give you an example from the 1950s.  In the middle of the 1950s, Lake Dallas dropped to 10 percent of capacity.  Imagine that; a public water-supply lake, at 10 percent of capacity.  It had to be very poor quality water.  And today, there are many millions of people living in that part of north Texas that didn’t live there, and if we’ve increased our usage of water, and if we’re in a warmer climate, and we’re evaporating more, it’s sort of a recipe for disaster.
Rob:  So what do we do?
Crawford:  I think we have to educate our young people to be aware that there is not an endless supply of this commodity.  We must get them to help lead the way to changing the way we use our most precious of resources.  Otherwise, a climate that warms is destined to bring us these mega droughts, and mega droughts will be very, very expensive.  For example, the mega drought of the 1980 era hit the Midwest corn-belt.  It was the number one weather disaster in the United States prior to Hurricane Katrina.  Actually two of the top three weather disasters, minus Katrina, are mega droughts, 40 to 60-billion dollar events that impact our economy.  So, that’s what has us concerned.
McManus:  Droughts of that nature are what we would like to say are society-changers.  Once you have a drought like that, things change.  The drought of the 1930s, the dust bowl drought, changed the way we conserve the land.  The 1950s drought didn’t have the dust bowl effects that we saw in the 30s due to the changes we made because of the 30s.  So, we haven’t had a drought that’s changed our society in, you know, 40 or 50 years.  So, the next drought will be, as I said, a shock to the system.
Crawford:  I don’t think we’re naysayers.  I think we’re both very upbeat about the world in which we live.  But, we also know what has been in our past, and we also see ominous clouds that are on the horizon, and I think we would be foolish if we didn’t talk about them in open forums such as this.  There’s just too much at stake.  An example of how this could come back to haunt us; if we end up in an extended period of a mega drought that affected whatever part of the United States it’s going to affect, there will come a time when public water supplies diminish.  And it may be tough to irrigate, it may be tough to make a living without adequate, affordable fresh water.  What we may find happening is that people will migrate from rural areas towards urban areas putting greater stress on urban water supplies, diminishing the tax base in rural areas, so the rural problem gets worse because of urban flight, and the urban problem gets worse because we now have people migrating towards large communities because that’s where the best water is.