Rob:  Nothing has more of an impact on water supplies in Oklahoma than our wild weather; and state officials warn, climate change could impact future water supplies.  Earlier, I visited with Ken Crawford and Gary McManus from Oklahoma’s Climatological Survey.  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.
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 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.  
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.
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.
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.  The mega droughts will be very, very expensive.
McManus:  Droughts of that nature are what we would like to say are society-changers.  Once you have 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.