July 28, 2023 • 46 mins
A conversation with Dr Millán Millán, director of the Centro de Estudios Ambientales del Mediterráneo (CEAM), about restoring the small water cycle, why the summer storms and rains have disappeared and how this turned out to be connected to massive snows in the UK, and massive floods in Central Europe and much more.
Learn from one of the key researchers in the water cycles space! Trained in Canada, aeronautical engineer who came back to his home land Spain, Millán Millán was tasked by the European Commission to research why the summer storms and rains that used to fall everywhere around the Mediterranean have now disappeared. And how this turned out to be connected to massive snows in UK, massive floods in Central Europe. This we knew in the seventies, the eighties, the nineties and definitely in the two thousands. What needs to be done and what can be done? Why has not been done? Learn from the frustrations of working with large political institutions like the European Commission that don’t have a muscle memory, a political memory or a solution memory anymore. They keep reinventing the wheel, they keep asking the some questions over and over again. Learn what Millán would do with a billion euro. How would he invest it? How would he put it to work and what effects could that have?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Learn from one of the key researchers in the water
cycle space.
Trained in Canada, anaeronautical engineer who came
back to Europe, his home country, spain, and who was tasked by
the European Commission toresearch why the summer storms,
the summer rains that have usedto fall everywhere around the
Mediterranean 3-4 times a weekin summer, have disappeared.
Why is that, and how it turnedout to be connected to massive
(00:21):
snowstorms in the UK and massivefloods in central Europe.
This we knew in the 70s, the80s, the 90s and definitely in
the 2000s.
What needs to be done, how muchit costs, what can be done, so
why hasn't it been done?
Learn from the frustrations ofworking with a large political
institution like the EuropeanCommission that don't really
have a muscle memory anymore, apolitical memory or a solution
(00:44):
memory.
They keep reinventing the samewheel, they keep asking the same
questions over and over againwithout doing something.
And learn what he would do witha billion euros, how would he
invest it, how would he put itto work and what effects would
it have.
If it's true that water vaporaccounts for 60-70% of the
(01:12):
greenhouse effect, well, co2only accounts for 25.
Why do we rarely discuss it?
Maybe we choose to ignore itbecause it means we literally
need to re-vegetate the entireearth, bring back the marshes,
the mangrove, superannualpastures with trees and re-grow
real forests that can bring backrain in strategic places.
In short, bring back life, lotsof plants, trees, animals, back
(01:34):
to many places on this earthnatural climate engineering.
It is time we take our role askeystone species super seriously
.
In this special water cycleseries, we interview the
dreamers and the doers who areusing the latest technology to
figure out where to intervenefirst.
They are making, or trying tomake, the investment and return
calculations and plans.
(01:55):
So what's missing?
What's holding us back?
Maybe we lack the imaginationto back them and try
regeneration at scale?
We are thankful for the supportof the Nest Family Office in
order to make this series.
The Nest is a family officededicated to building a more
resilient food system throughsupporting natural solutions and
innovative technologies thatchange the way we produce food.
(02:15):
You can find out more on thenestfocom.
(02:35):
Welcome to a new episode.
We have Dr Miran Nian with us,who is not only an aeronautical
engineer but has done absolutelyfundamental work on the water
cycles and also and you willthink of him every time he goes
through the airport now hasdesigned the metal check gates.
Basically, you go through there, but that's not why we are here
today with him.
I'm very happy to have him heretoday.
(02:55):
We had some small technicalissues getting here and we might
have a bit of background noiseleft and right, as I'm in a
co-working space, Actuallyfocused next to the water and
focused on a lot of circulareconomy pieces, so I wanted to
make a point.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
The point is that in some areas of the Mediterranean
the water cycle has gone to onehalf of what it was
traditionally.
I don't care how much money youinvest, you only have half of
the resource you had in the1970s, and that's a fact,
(03:33):
because people are trying to doall sorts of things, but the
resource is just not there.
It could be recovered, like theChinese have done, but it would
require some sophisticatedinvestments and waiting 12 to 15
years.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Which is possible.
I mean, that's exactly why I'minterested in the water cycles.
But then from a okay, what canwe do with it?
and what can we do with thisknowledge?
Is it possible to restore?
And if yes, where do we startAnd how much do we need And
where do we need to begin?
But we'll get to that later, soin a second to start and to
(04:12):
welcome you to the show.
Thank you very much for cominghere.
Just a bit of background.
Do you remember the first timeI mean, you were tasked by the
European Commission to look intowater cycles?
Do you remember the first timeyou stumbled upon the thing of
water cycle, like the first timeyou looked at that in
(04:33):
connection to what you're doingnow, as you designed metal gates
at airports?
that's a very different thing.
But how did you end up focusingon the water cycles?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Well, basically I was helping the European Commission
and other countries.
for instance, in Holland theair quality monitoring network
was optimized using theprocedures I had developed.
in Canada That was done by aclass one and one in the reef,
(05:08):
and so I was essentially workingwith metal methodology,
dispersion of atmosphericpollutants.
The European Commission wastrying to elaborate directives,
legislation applicable to all ofEurope, and very quickly by
(05:28):
1986, they had discovered thatthere were a lot of procedures
that had been developed inAtlantic Europe that just did
not work in the southern states.
So that because of my trainingin applied meteorology, the
(05:49):
Commission asked me if I couldrevise all the data from all the
European projects in southernEurope and try to do a
reinterpretation of themeteorological data associated
with the water cycle,specifically the loss of summer
(06:09):
storms, the increasing floods inthe coastal areas, the
increasing floods in centralEurope in summer, all together
the fact that in southern Europethe runoff has a sort of half
in many of the basins.
(06:30):
So I started looking at it.
I found why the storms are lostand there is a competition
between housing along thecoastal areas and agriculture,
and if you do housing you changethe characteristics of the air
(06:50):
that comes in with the seabreeze and you kill the summer
storms.
So people are requesting water,but at the same time they're
making the moves to kill thewater cycle and that of course
propagates down to the upperscales, and we knew that by 1995
(07:12):
.
By 1997 the commission told mewhat you have found for southern
Europe is very interesting, butunless you find the
consequences for the largestEurope it won't be of much
interest.
So I started working on that in1997.
(07:33):
by the year 2000 we knew why youhave now many more floods in
northern Europe, why you havefloods in England that
historically never have happened.
They had snow storms in Englandthat had never happened before
in historical times.
You have very large floods insummer along the, the European
(07:57):
continental divide, and in theMediterranean.
half of your water is basicallygone, and that's a present
situation.
It so happened that about thesame time we were doing this,
the Chinese had done the, theLos Plateau Resolation Program,
(08:19):
and once the, the vegetationcover grew to a certain extent,
they started recovering theso-called small water cycle,
local storms and so on, so thatthe, the vegetation, feeds
moisture to the atmosphericprocesses that produce rain, and
(08:41):
what you do basically then isrecycle the same amount of water
in Mediterranean areas likeTurkey or Greece.
they don't get almost any waterfrom the Atlantic.
All the water they get has beenre-evaporated either in the sea
or on the coastal areas, and ifyou fiddle around with the
(09:06):
surface properties you kill yourwater cycle simple.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
I love how you say fiddle around, like basically we
paved most of the coastal areasfor houses.
Fiddling is a bigunderstatement.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Automatically your small water cycle is killed.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
And so what do we do like?
what do we've seen in the LosPlateau, the example your work
has shown clearly that let's saythe whole Mediterranean is
connected to the UK, it'sprobably connected to everywhere
else as well.
But let's say, and?
but it started with a smalltask of, or small between
brackets of, okay, why are thereno summer storms anymore?
(09:44):
we used to have in theMediterranean very regular,
let's say four or five o'clockin the afternoon, almost every
day, very regular showers.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Not too much, not too little and they disappeared.
In Italy they still have morefrequent storms along the
upinines because they have theconvergence of two seabrooses,
the ionic and the Adriatic Sea,but yet they're also losing
storms as you build along thecoastal area.
(10:15):
The problem, very simple, isthat if you modify the surface,
you also modify the temperatureacquired by the sea, breeze, air
mass coming in, and you alsomodify the water, its water
content, and you need a certainratio to have precipitation at
(10:38):
the head, at the headwaters ofthose mountains, which may be
1800 meters, 2000, 2000, somemeters.
If you overheat that air mass,the storm is gone.
It's just pure thermodynamics,there is no magic in it.
It's just you don't put enoughmoisture to compensate the the
(10:59):
changes you have made If youpaved?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
if you paved that piece of the coast, of course,
because we want to be there, wewant to live there, we want to
have holidays there, etc.
if we paved that with concreteand buildings instead of the,
the swamps, the vegetation itwas, it doesn't get loaded
enough to then fall down againstthe hills it gets overheated
and it doesn't pick up enoughmoisture to compensate the
(11:24):
overheating.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Now, one of the solutions you could do in Europe
, in the Mediterranean, that wediscussed extensively in the
European Commission back in theyear 2010 was that there are a
lot of abandoned lands inland.
Those abandoned lands could bereforested or revegetated.
(11:47):
With the first, you have toirrigate them with some water,
and you could.
You can actually calculate howmuch area you have to reforest
to get the storm.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Now we're getting to the interesting bits.
So I mean you're saying you cancalculate.
I'm pretty sure you did.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
I did and it is probably like what kind of?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
dimension we need to do.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Or you're talking of the order of 16 000 hectares,
about 16 kilometers by 10kilometers area.
The one other very interestingsituation is that because in the
western Mediterranean all thesecirculations happen at once in
Italy, southern France, northernAfrica, spain there are some
(12:32):
compensatory motions in theatmosphere and so that the the
air volumes displaced by thecibris are perfectly well
defined.
They have 160 kilometers length, 250 meters depth per unit
distance along the coast andwhatever you do in that volume,
(12:56):
good or bad, it all adds up.
If you construct, you kill themoisture and you increase the
temperature, and if you reforest, you decrease the temperature
and increase the moisture.
So it's like you.
You don't get anything fromoutside or any magic, it's just
(13:18):
a certain volume.
What you do in that volume iswhat you get And where to start
like.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Are there like specific places or specific?
Speaker 2 (13:32):
areas that have been abandoned in the large but not
too far in that area.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
No, not too far in that area They are within the
run of the cibris.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
You know they are 40, 50, 60, 80 kilometers land.
As a matter of fact, many ofthem are just a few kilometers
before the area where the stormsused to develop, because many
of those areas ahead what theycall non-irrigated crops that
fed of the summer storms.
(14:05):
They had one to three summerstorms per week in some of those
areas.
Now they're gone And a lot ofthat vegetation was fed by the
occasional down power.
Yeah, rains.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
That poor?
Yeah, that's what we make, andso, as we knew this in the 2000s
, what is your best guess thatnot too much has happened, like
why haven't we acted if we knewthis 20 years ago?
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Because nobody.
You know, i had a lot ofproblems with the politicians
who wanted to develop tourism sobadly And what they did
basically was try to shut downmy institution.
There was a political order toclose my institution.
I had to call the commission.
(14:56):
There were a few calls back andforth and the regional minister
who said that was immediatelyfired and sent to Brussels where
he probably could do even moredamage.
But the point is that there arepolitical parties that don't
just don't want to hear that youcannot develop and bring
(15:17):
tourism to the coastal areas,and yet they're the same guys
who are trying to get watertransfers and other things to
compensate for the water thatthey have lost.
You know, the success or thelucky strike would be if those
same guys are convinced that youcould make money by re-forcing
(15:44):
with good trees, like walnuttrees, that they're worth a lot
of money the wood is worth a lotof money And you could at the
same time, recover the watercycle.
This was actually mentioned bythe European Commission in the
COP meeting of the UnitedNations in Cancun in the year
(16:08):
2010.
I can send you the flyerprinted by the European
Commission mentioning that youcould re-forest in selected
areas around the MediterraneanBasin to create jobs and recover
the water cycle and also avoidthe soil going down in floods
(16:29):
down towards the coast.
So all the ingredients areknown.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Are there yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
The point is that if there is anybody who wants to
listen and put the whole piecetogether, this has also been
addressed by the EuropeanCommission.
There was a scientific missionof the European Commission in
the year 2010 to the Commissionof Sciences of the United States
(16:57):
, attended by President Obama,and I can send that to you also
so you can read theirconclusions.
Please do That.
When you start divertingirrigation water to human use,
you run into the problem thatyou lose its arms, because it
(17:18):
was already published inscientific papers.
It is not just magic, but theysay the water cycle has to be
looked at its full scale.
It means from the sea all theway up to the headwaters of the
local regional valleys.
You know, in Atlantic Europe,north of the European
(17:43):
continental divide, you're luckyGod loves you because you're
mostly Protestant, i guess Andyou get 100% of your water
evaporated from the Atlantic Inthe Mediterranean as you go
towards the center of theMediterranean.
100% of the water isrecirculated, recycled within
(18:04):
the Mediterranean basin, andland use is a key component to
recycle that water.
Once that is known, you cansolve the problem.
But there are a lot of peoplewho don't want to hear that.
They just want the fast profitaround the coastal areas,
buildings and that's it.
(18:25):
And in the one water.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Hotels.
Yeah, and imagine you're on theother side.
So you are on the money makingside and you are tasked by the
European Commission or a largeinvestor to put quite a lot of
money to work.
So let's say a billion euros.
You have one billion euros,it's one with nine zeros, but it
(18:47):
needs to have a return, afinancial return, at some point.
It could be 20 years, could be25 years, could be 50 years.
Where would you start And whatwould you do if you had so much
money that you could invest?
Speaker 2 (18:59):
OK, i would go to a good balance.
Ok, if you have electric powerplants run by coal and you begin
to see that solar panels areuseful, i wouldn't fight the
(19:19):
solar panel connectors.
I would buy their shares sothat eventually I can switch
from coal to solar panels.
The same thing here, i mean youcan do development, but if you
know what you're affectinginland, you could compensate at
the same time, because some ofthose lands are abandoned, so
(19:40):
you could buy them for verylittle price And with a
reasonable amount of investment,plus the fact that the European
Commission would probablycooperate because of the
climatic impact of those changes.
So you could have the houses.
Make sure that the houses arepainted white to reflect the
(20:01):
solar heat, make sure that thehouses have plenty of trees
around, make sure that the soilis not sealed, that you put
blocks that allow some of thegrass to come through and the
water to go in and out, and, atthe same time, make a long term
investment, buying enoughhectares inland to ensure that
(20:23):
within 10 or 12 years you getback the water from the small
water cycle And that would, inturn, stabilize the other floods
and major hydrological eventsthat we are experiencing now,
which are the direct consequenceof what you have done around
the coastal areas.
(20:44):
So all it requires is that somefellows who do the investment
short and long term at the sametime Not just a short term,
because I don't care how manyhouses you build, in 10 years
they will have no water.
I mean, in the Valencia areathey would probably have water
(21:04):
restrictions, let's say withintwo years, and then they'll want
an instantaneous solution andthey go and they dissolve the
water from the sea And that onlyaggravates the problem, because
the salty water going out ofGibraltar activates something
called the Gibralto salinityvalve And that's the one that
(21:31):
makes that the English have nowfloods in summer and snowstorms
in winter.
It's all linked.
You don't perturbed the systemin one place and not expect
anything else to happen.
So if you look at the cycle atthe full cycle and that's what I
did for the European Commissionand there are a few very thick
(21:55):
reports submitted to the peoplewho are in charge at the time,
and they were the first onesconvinced that you have to try
to look at the water cycle atits proper scale And the
European Commission would havebeen willing to even finance the
recovery of the ecosystems sothat you could have agriculture.
(22:17):
Irrigated agriculture was thesubstitute of the old marshes
around the Mediterranean Basin,that you could have irrigated
agriculture with depurated wateror, once you get the
hydrological cycle working again, you could have plenty of water
for customers and for farmers.
(22:41):
The only one thing is that Onecertain river valley is capable
of if you have it working 100%.
It only is capable ofmaintaining a certain amount of
people, and that is the harshestfact.
You know, we are too many nowprobably.
So that's a philosophicalquestion.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
That's another episode and another podcast, so
I think it's fascinating whatyou're mentioning, that it's not
that we have to bring back allthe marshes.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
All I'm telling you has been published in scientific
papers and also in Europeanreports that apparently nobody
reads.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
But that's one of the points that the politicians
that don't read.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
And the other problem I have experienced ever since I
came from Canada, of which I amactually very sorry I left.
Coming to Europe was a realmistake.
At the time we thought we weregoing to do something great and
we have become dominated bypoliticians and civil servants
I'm going to use the words of ahigh European scientific person.
(23:56):
You know the most rusted civilservants, particularly in the
southern states, that don't readanything.
They probably respond to thepoliticians and even though
everything is published, theyjust don't read it.
Maybe one of the problems thatit is published in English and
many of the civil servants downhere don't speak English.
(24:18):
So anyway, the problem can besolved.
And then bring me to anotherquestion.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
actually Bring me to another question.
If there's one thing you wouldchange overnight, like you have
the magic one, so not speakingmagic, because we don't want
magic, but if there's somethingyou could change overnight, but
only one thing, what would thatbe?
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I would go back to the way the European Commission
function.
before Madame Carrefour.
She dismounted the whole ideaof getting people building up a
scientific memory as one app,from scientific officers to area
(24:59):
directors, and by doing thatshe killed the memory of the
scientific memory of theEuropean Commission.
So all these things that weknew very well in the late 90s
and early 2000s, theydisappeared because the people
who were doing those projects,they were shifted from one
(25:22):
division to another and so theygo, their memory.
So I was actually invited tobecome one area director in the
European Commission with themission of fighting off the
European Parliament and makingsure that the technology core of
(25:43):
the European Commission remain,to maintain the memory and not
go reinventing the same thingover and over and over again.
And that didn't used to be theway, but it became the way after
the early 2000s.
That's the thing I would.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Do you think something is I'm not saying
something is changing.
You've been in the space,obviously, literally space, for
a long, long time, but does itfeel different now?
Is there a small shiver of hopeor optimism you see or not Like
?
does it feel that with theattention for I see much more
(26:27):
attention for water cycles,regeneration, regenerative
agriculture, soil does it feeldifferent?
Or you say we've been throughthese cycles, i've seen this
interest and then it goes awaybecause we see something else
shining.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
It's a matter of having the people informed
properly, including the majorinvestors, and open up a little
gate to start looking long-term,long-scale.
And there are a lot of documentsprepared by the European
Commission, by DG Environmentand DG Research that suggested
(27:00):
that already back in the year2006 to the year 2012.
In fact, there was an initiativecalled Blue Print Water for
Europe where they contemplatedadopting the water framework
directive differently indifferent European countries
(27:24):
with different water problems,because one of the problems in
Europe also was another issuecalled unfair competition.
And if you were going to change, say, the water directives in
Southern Europe to take care oftheir problems, maybe there was
an unfair competition with theDutch or with the Danish, and at
(27:49):
some times people got stuckwith the concept that to start
with cannot be applied becausethe water cycle in one place is
not the same.
And then, talking aboutexamples, i worked from the very
beginning with Dutch groupsclass van Egmond, tonys
(28:12):
Schneider.
the optimization of the airquality monitoring network done
in Holland was done with thetechniques I had developed in
Canada in the 1970.
And the one thing thatimpressed me about the Dutch a
part of being tall and handsome.
and they buy from you and theysell to the profit.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
This is just audio.
There's no video here.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Okay is that they do seem to be the group in Europe
that seems to be able tomaintain continuity.
The information that comes inone leg goes to the whole system
.
Okay, many of the largeinvestments worldwide are done
(28:59):
by Dutch companies that makingenough money in their area, they
put aside a little bit of moneyto do something else, like it's
happening now with theReforestation of the Sainte-Aï
Peninsula, for instance,recovering the Bardauer Lake to
make a fishery and at the sametime trying to recover the
(29:21):
storms locally.
They have other problems withterrorism and so on.
But it also shows that bykeeping the system very aware of
how the different parts youhave one leg of the octopus you
have environmentalists, and atthe other leg of the octopus you
(29:42):
have Phillips or you haveHeineken or you have something
else, and there is acommunication through so that
they all know more or less whatthe other guys are doing.
For a long time That has beengoing on for as long as I know.
If we could copy that system inother parts of Europe, we
probably would do much better.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
And to somehow conclude, what would be your
main message to, let's say,we're doing this in a theater,
we have a room full of peoplethat work in finance, in
investing.
What would be your main messagebe Is that the think short and
long?
Or would you have anothermessage, like what would be
(30:26):
we're in stage, we're talkingabout the water cycles.
What would we want people toremember when they walk out of
that theater?
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Well, they would have to remember that the water in
the planet is the same one sincethe time of the dinosaurs, and
you see water, a lot of water,in a tropical forest or in a
tropical island.
When you see the same amount ofwater recirculated one day
(30:54):
after another, as soon as youkill the recycling mechanism,
water is gone and you get adesert.
Yet the water that was there isnow in the atmosphere, playing
a greenhouse effect, which isdirectly responsible for the
situation we're in now.
(31:14):
Co2 is just a teeny-meaty mousecompared with the water vapor
absorption bands.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
So we're getting to the interesting piece.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Okay, but that is scientifically proven.
It's just atmospheric radiationand thermodynamics.
But it's very counter.
Well, they listen to it.
Very simple If you change soil,soil belongs to somebody.
If you do something to theatmosphere, the atmosphere is
everybody's.
So it's a shared problem thatyou can do things or not, but
(31:47):
you don't tell anybody what todo with their properties.
And that was, in my point, theweakest link in the climate
change dilemma nowadays, becausethe two legs of climate change
greenhouse gases and land usechanges were known very well in
the late eight, sixties And insome United States,
(32:13):
massachusetts Institute ofTechnology report published in
1971.
It's just that, as is usual inmany cases, there is a crowd of
people that follow the leaderand they make money going to
these big meetings and so on,but they have never solved any
problem.
If you look at the reports ofthe United Nations, they have
(32:34):
been making one mistake afteranother for the last 30 years
Because their models don'tinclude the small water cycles
and other things that propagateupwards.
So if the model doesn't havethem, the model cannot tell you
what's going to happen.
So the message to the peoplethat know and have the funds is
(32:55):
they should make sure that a bigthinking body, which in this
case was European Commission atone time, should be there to
guide the actions and you candiscuss with them, like we did
at one time, to see OK, you wantdevelopment, but do it in a
wise way.
(33:16):
Make sure you interrupt thewater cycle the least possible
And, if necessary, invest alittle bit long term to recover
the system in some place wherenow it's totally abandoned And
at the end you'll haveeverything you want in the short
(33:37):
and in the long term.
But if you only think short term, you are in for troubles.
And if the some stupidpolitician comes and destroys
the memory build that within theEuropean Commission thinking
tanks, you're in for trouble.
Now most of the work is done bysubcontracting and they have
(34:00):
people who have not even readall these antique papers that
were published in the early2000s.
So we're back again at thesquare one because some
politician destroyed somethingthat took 40 years to build that
And that.
I'm very skeptical now becauseI see the politicians and let me
(34:24):
quote me on that The most andmost stupid they are, the higher
they go.
It's a pity at one time and nopoliticians were very well
trained professionally, but Ipersonally wouldn't allow
anybody to get in politicsunless he has demonstrated that
he can earn a living working insomething useful for at least 20
(34:46):
years before he goes intopolitics.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
That's a very, very good point.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
You're talking to a very old I'm going to turn 82
man who has been working in thesame area back since 1967.
So I've seen a little thing.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
You've seen it all I can identify.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
The worst problem is when you lose memory of what you
have done, what turned out okay, what didn't turn out, what
improvements you have to do andthe kind of things that you
should do, short term and longterm.
Once you lose that memory, youare reinventing the wheel time
and time again, every four yearsor so.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Which is a very, very important message, and I want
to thank you so much for cominghere, not only to share on the
water cycles, but especiallyalso to bring that message to
the audience.
Like we think in cycles andinvestors think about actually.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I can send you the papers I'm talking to you about,
written by the EuropeanCommission.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
We can put everything in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
I can send them to you, at least for you to look,
because I'm not saying anythingnew.
I mean, we're talking aboutthat.
We're actually trying to figureout ways of financing the
recovery of all these abandonedlands to recover the
hydrological cycle, and theEuropean Commission, the people
I work with, they were willingto get the funding to do that.
(36:20):
So for a fellow working in anyarea, let's say agriculture or
housing, he could make a littleside investment long term,
supported by the EuropeanCommission.
Actually, he could be makingmoney by buying abandoned lands
(36:43):
and putting them to recover thehydrological cycle, like they
did in China.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Making sure that the housing development has long
term water.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Well, the housing development is done with the
proper things.
For instance, they have done itin Germany.
You have houses, you force themto have a little water
reservoir so that you get therainwater to irrigate your
plants.
Okay, they don't do that inGermany, but they don't do that
(37:11):
in Spain, which is stupid,because this is a place where
you should do that.
And the worst part about it andI'm going back about the loss of
memory is that Spain was verywell known for having a dense
network of so-called aljives.
There were natural waterstorage well, some of them
artificial, in dry lands, sothat the little bit of runoff
(37:37):
there was you could catch andyou could use for drinking or
for other purposes.
All that tradition, all thatknow-how is now gone, and it's
amazing that the Germans, afterall this discussion I mean
Holtzworth was the worlddirector in Germany and when he
(37:59):
heard what I had to say, theGerman legislation was changed
to ensure that any new housingwould have a means of storage
water to be used for the smallgarden or for the plants, and
yet in Spain, where they needthe water, they didn't do it.
So that's what I mean aboutmaking sure that they know how
(38:22):
is not lost.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
It's not lost.
yeah, and we, so there's noneed for magic.
We know how to do this.
We've done it many, many timesacross the globe.
And now it comes to thequestion do we want to, and how
do we do it at scale enough tonot, of course, amazing to water
your garden?
but it needs to be part of amuch bigger system that actually
(38:45):
restores the water cycle, which, honestly, to me still sounds a
bit like magic, like you canbring back rains.
that sounds out of this world,but it's probably what we need.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
It has been demonstrated in China for other
reasons, but they got the rainback, but still it sounds a bit
magic Like you sound so far fromour world.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Like you can influence the weather.
Of course we do it every dayand we have done as a Keystone
species, but to be able to bringback rain it's quite a powerful
thing.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
But you can bring it down in the places where you
have three cycles very welldefined.
In Holland you have the largeAtlantic cycle, but as soon as
you go into Europe, in SouthernEurope, you have to realize that
you have three cycles The smallone.
(39:37):
The small water cycle is thesummer storms.
The regional cycle, which arethe Mediterranean cyclones, the
medikanes, as they call them now, and the Atlantic.
Basically, there is onlypresent in the areas of the
interface between the Atlanticand an European catchment basin.
(40:00):
Let me tell you something If Ihad enough money and a few years
less, i would be buying upevery single piece of land that
has been abandoned.
Many of them are difficult tobuy because they're in the hands
of the heirs of people who leftthree generations ago.
(40:22):
Try to find them and find thesignature is going to be
difficult If you have enoughmoney, you could buy them, and
then I would reforest withvegetation and adopt it to the
terrain.
I would have a tough time withecologists because they want to
do things according to a naturalsystem, and I have to remind
(40:43):
them that in Europe,particularly in Southern Europe,
there is no natural systempresent anywhere.
In the last 2000 years,beginning with the Romans,
everything has changed.
All the vegetation you see,even in the Ops, was changed to
get logs for the railroad tidesat one time.
(41:06):
The old forests of beach andfires and some of the other
things are now gone.
So what an ecologist will lookat as a natural system is one
that has been modified by 2000years old, and that would be
also another problem.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
And so it would basically be buying up, which is
a strategy, and that's muchland, not too far from the coast
, not too far from the hillstart.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
No, no, no.
As far as the headwater of theriver valley, i would buy
anywhere in the run of the sea.
The sea breeze runs 160kilometers a day, which, if you
consider that the averagemountain range around Europe is
(41:52):
about 80 to 100 kilometers offthe coast, it means that it has
enough land to go there and comeback And I would buy land
within that range as much as Icould.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Thank you so much for sharing that.
Let's hope some people withboth the capital and, as you
said a few years last and energyto do it.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Maybe somebody does it To do it.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
yeah, because it's something that needs to be done.
So I want to thank you so muchfor your time, for sharing, for
staying in, because you don'thave to do this.
You've been in this space along time, can I add?
Speaker 2 (42:29):
something for a second, of course.
Ok, i presented these at theEuropean Parliament twice, and
one in the year 2009,.
After I made my presentationwith all the data, there was
some parliamentarian fromAustria who told me that what I
(42:51):
was saying about theMediterranean was all very
interesting, but that there weresome directives that should be
applied.
And, of course, i thought aboutit for a second.
I told them very nicely inthese words I'm afraid that you
don't have a fucking clue ofwhat you're talking about.
(43:11):
Ok, do you eat chicken?
He was very embarrassed at thetime.
He said yes, said do you go andhunt chicken every morning?
No, are there any wild chickensleft in Europe?
Two or three species, andthat's it.
But you eat chicken, don't you?
Yeah, somebody invented thechicken farm.
(43:33):
So much land, so much food, somuch water, so many chickens, so
many eggs and so many chicken.
For me, if you, all of this,had a large banquet and you eat
all the chickens in the farm thefollowing day, there are no
eggs.
The message is that you have tofarm water at its proper scale.
(43:58):
Ok, watershed by watershed, andin southern Europe you had to
do it in the small watershed.
So I think I have bored youenough with all that.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
No, no, i think it was just writing down literally
the title which you might turn.
That turns out to be the titlefarm water at its proper scale
And and the systems, and that's,i think, a very important
message.
It's not that northern Europecan just look at southern Europe
getting dry and fire and flood,as it's happening now, but it's
literally connected to thefloods over there.
(44:31):
It's literally connected to thesnowstorms in the UK.
We're all in this together ifwe like it or not, and water
might be the sort of bindingforce there.
Like it's very important totalk about soil, carbon and
biodiversity and insects, all ofthat, but maybe water is the
more, the stronger and easierconnector that we need to, the
component that will trigger allthe others.
(44:53):
I'm not saying the other impactis not there, but it might be
the one where we are most scaredof in the Netherlands to a
certain extent, or most havelearned to deal with to a
certain extent, but it'ssomething we just cannot escape.
You have either too much, toolittle or just enough, and most
of us are living in places nowwhere we not have just enough.
We either have too much or toolittle or on the wrong moment.
(45:15):
So I think it's that that's whywe're recording this series,
obviously on the water cycle.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
So absolutely no boredom, just just to finish,
what we discover in 30 someyears of work is the same thing
that the tourist and the allromantic writer Noose from the
late 1700s is that theMediterranean is different from
(45:41):
central northern Europe.
Ok, what we have done isdocument the little features
that make it be different Andbasically, that's it.
Once you know you can, you,once you have a diagnosis of
your illness, you can design atreatment that you cannot go
applying, treatments that havebeen designed for the wrong
(46:03):
patient, ok.
Learn from one of the key researchers in the water
cycle space.
Trained in Canada, anaeronautical engineer who came
back to Europe, his home country, spain, and who was tasked by
the European Commission toresearch why the summer storms,
the summer rains that have usedto fall everywhere around the
Mediterranean 3-4 times a weekin summer, have disappeared.
Why is that, and how it turnedout to be connected to massive
(00:21):
snowstorms in the UK and massivefloods in central Europe.
This we knew in the 70s, the80s, the 90s and definitely in
the 2000s.
What needs to be done, how muchit costs, what can be done, so
why hasn't it been done?
Learn from the frustrations ofworking with a large political
institution like the EuropeanCommission that don't really
have a muscle memory anymore, apolitical memory or a solution
(00:44):
memory.
They keep reinventing the samewheel, they keep asking the same
questions over and over againwithout doing something.
And learn what he would do witha billion euros, how would he
invest it, how would he put itto work and what effects would
it have.
If it's true that water vaporaccounts for 60-70% of the
(01:12):
greenhouse effect, well, co2only accounts for 25.
Why do we rarely discuss it?
Maybe we choose to ignore itbecause it means we literally
need to re-vegetate the entireearth, bring back the marshes,
the mangrove, superannualpastures with trees and re-grow
real forests that can bring backrain in strategic places.
In short, bring back life, lotsof plants, trees, animals, back
(01:34):
to many places on this earthnatural climate engineering.
It is time we take our role askeystone species super seriously
.
In this special water cycleseries, we interview the
dreamers and the doers who areusing the latest technology to
figure out where to intervenefirst.
They are making, or trying tomake, the investment and return
calculations and plans.
(01:55):
So what's missing?
What's holding us back?
Maybe we lack the imaginationto back them and try
regeneration at scale?
We are thankful for the supportof the Nest Family Office in
order to make this series.
The Nest is a family officededicated to building a more
resilient food system throughsupporting natural solutions and
innovative technologies thatchange the way we produce food.
(02:15):
You can find out more on thenestfocom.
(02:35):
Welcome to a new episode.
We have Dr Miran Nian with us,who is not only an aeronautical
engineer but has done absolutelyfundamental work on the water
cycles and also and you willthink of him every time he goes
through the airport now hasdesigned the metal check gates.
Basically, you go through there, but that's not why we are here
today with him.
I'm very happy to have him heretoday.
(02:55):
We had some small technicalissues getting here and we might
have a bit of background noiseleft and right, as I'm in a
co-working space, Actuallyfocused next to the water and
focused on a lot of circulareconomy pieces, so I wanted to
make a point.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
The point is that in some areas of the Mediterranean
the water cycle has gone to onehalf of what it was
traditionally.
I don't care how much money youinvest, you only have half of
the resource you had in the1970s, and that's a fact,
(03:33):
because people are trying to doall sorts of things, but the
resource is just not there.
It could be recovered, like theChinese have done, but it would
require some sophisticatedinvestments and waiting 12 to 15
years.
Speaker 1 (03:52):
Which is possible.
I mean, that's exactly why I'minterested in the water cycles.
But then from a okay, what canwe do with it?
and what can we do with thisknowledge?
Is it possible to restore?
And if yes, where do we startAnd how much do we need And
where do we need to begin?
But we'll get to that later, soin a second to start and to
(04:12):
welcome you to the show.
Thank you very much for cominghere.
Just a bit of background.
Do you remember the first timeI mean, you were tasked by the
European Commission to look intowater cycles?
Do you remember the first timeyou stumbled upon the thing of
water cycle, like the first timeyou looked at that in
(04:33):
connection to what you're doingnow, as you designed metal gates
at airports?
that's a very different thing.
But how did you end up focusingon the water cycles?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Well, basically I was helping the European Commission
and other countries.
for instance, in Holland theair quality monitoring network
was optimized using theprocedures I had developed.
in Canada That was done by aclass one and one in the reef,
(05:08):
and so I was essentially workingwith metal methodology,
dispersion of atmosphericpollutants.
The European Commission wastrying to elaborate directives,
legislation applicable to all ofEurope, and very quickly by
(05:28):
1986, they had discovered thatthere were a lot of procedures
that had been developed inAtlantic Europe that just did
not work in the southern states.
So that because of my trainingin applied meteorology, the
(05:49):
Commission asked me if I couldrevise all the data from all the
European projects in southernEurope and try to do a
reinterpretation of themeteorological data associated
with the water cycle,specifically the loss of summer
(06:09):
storms, the increasing floods inthe coastal areas, the
increasing floods in centralEurope in summer, all together
the fact that in southern Europethe runoff has a sort of half
in many of the basins.
(06:30):
So I started looking at it.
I found why the storms are lostand there is a competition
between housing along thecoastal areas and agriculture,
and if you do housing you changethe characteristics of the air
(06:50):
that comes in with the seabreeze and you kill the summer
storms.
So people are requesting water,but at the same time they're
making the moves to kill thewater cycle and that of course
propagates down to the upperscales, and we knew that by 1995
(07:12):
.
By 1997 the commission told mewhat you have found for southern
Europe is very interesting, butunless you find the
consequences for the largestEurope it won't be of much
interest.
So I started working on that in1997.
(07:33):
by the year 2000 we knew why youhave now many more floods in
northern Europe, why you havefloods in England that
historically never have happened.
They had snow storms in Englandthat had never happened before
in historical times.
You have very large floods insummer along the, the European
(07:57):
continental divide, and in theMediterranean.
half of your water is basicallygone, and that's a present
situation.
It so happened that about thesame time we were doing this,
the Chinese had done the, theLos Plateau Resolation Program,
(08:19):
and once the, the vegetationcover grew to a certain extent,
they started recovering theso-called small water cycle,
local storms and so on, so thatthe, the vegetation, feeds
moisture to the atmosphericprocesses that produce rain, and
(08:41):
what you do basically then isrecycle the same amount of water
in Mediterranean areas likeTurkey or Greece.
they don't get almost any waterfrom the Atlantic.
All the water they get has beenre-evaporated either in the sea
or on the coastal areas, and ifyou fiddle around with the
(09:06):
surface properties you kill yourwater cycle simple.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
I love how you say fiddle around, like basically we
paved most of the coastal areasfor houses.
Fiddling is a bigunderstatement.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Automatically your small water cycle is killed.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
And so what do we do like?
what do we've seen in the LosPlateau, the example your work
has shown clearly that let's saythe whole Mediterranean is
connected to the UK, it'sprobably connected to everywhere
else as well.
But let's say, and?
but it started with a smalltask of, or small between
brackets of, okay, why are thereno summer storms anymore?
(09:44):
we used to have in theMediterranean very regular,
let's say four or five o'clockin the afternoon, almost every
day, very regular showers.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Not too much, not too little and they disappeared.
In Italy they still have morefrequent storms along the
upinines because they have theconvergence of two seabrooses,
the ionic and the Adriatic Sea,but yet they're also losing
storms as you build along thecoastal area.
(10:15):
The problem, very simple, isthat if you modify the surface,
you also modify the temperatureacquired by the sea, breeze, air
mass coming in, and you alsomodify the water, its water
content, and you need a certainratio to have precipitation at
(10:38):
the head, at the headwaters ofthose mountains, which may be
1800 meters, 2000, 2000, somemeters.
If you overheat that air mass,the storm is gone.
It's just pure thermodynamics,there is no magic in it.
It's just you don't put enoughmoisture to compensate the the
(10:59):
changes you have made If youpaved?
Speaker 1 (11:02):
if you paved that piece of the coast, of course,
because we want to be there, wewant to live there, we want to
have holidays there, etc.
if we paved that with concreteand buildings instead of the,
the swamps, the vegetation itwas, it doesn't get loaded
enough to then fall down againstthe hills it gets overheated
and it doesn't pick up enoughmoisture to compensate the
(11:24):
overheating.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Now, one of the solutions you could do in Europe
, in the Mediterranean, that wediscussed extensively in the
European Commission back in theyear 2010 was that there are a
lot of abandoned lands inland.
Those abandoned lands could bereforested or revegetated.
(11:47):
With the first, you have toirrigate them with some water,
and you could.
You can actually calculate howmuch area you have to reforest
to get the storm.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Now we're getting to the interesting bits.
So I mean you're saying you cancalculate.
I'm pretty sure you did.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
I did and it is probably like what kind of?
Speaker 1 (12:07):
dimension we need to do.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Or you're talking of the order of 16 000 hectares,
about 16 kilometers by 10kilometers area.
The one other very interestingsituation is that because in the
western Mediterranean all thesecirculations happen at once in
Italy, southern France, northernAfrica, spain there are some
(12:32):
compensatory motions in theatmosphere and so that the the
air volumes displaced by thecibris are perfectly well
defined.
They have 160 kilometers length, 250 meters depth per unit
distance along the coast andwhatever you do in that volume,
(12:56):
good or bad, it all adds up.
If you construct, you kill themoisture and you increase the
temperature, and if you reforest, you decrease the temperature
and increase the moisture.
So it's like you.
You don't get anything fromoutside or any magic, it's just
(13:18):
a certain volume.
What you do in that volume iswhat you get And where to start
like.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Are there like specific places or specific?
Speaker 2 (13:32):
areas that have been abandoned in the large but not
too far in that area.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
No, not too far in that area They are within the
run of the cibris.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
You know they are 40, 50, 60, 80 kilometers land.
As a matter of fact, many ofthem are just a few kilometers
before the area where the stormsused to develop, because many
of those areas ahead what theycall non-irrigated crops that
fed of the summer storms.
(14:05):
They had one to three summerstorms per week in some of those
areas.
Now they're gone And a lot ofthat vegetation was fed by the
occasional down power.
Yeah, rains.
Speaker 1 (14:21):
That poor?
Yeah, that's what we make, andso, as we knew this in the 2000s
, what is your best guess thatnot too much has happened, like
why haven't we acted if we knewthis 20 years ago?
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Because nobody.
You know, i had a lot ofproblems with the politicians
who wanted to develop tourism sobadly And what they did
basically was try to shut downmy institution.
There was a political order toclose my institution.
I had to call the commission.
(14:56):
There were a few calls back andforth and the regional minister
who said that was immediatelyfired and sent to Brussels where
he probably could do even moredamage.
But the point is that there arepolitical parties that don't
just don't want to hear that youcannot develop and bring
(15:17):
tourism to the coastal areas,and yet they're the same guys
who are trying to get watertransfers and other things to
compensate for the water thatthey have lost.
You know, the success or thelucky strike would be if those
same guys are convinced that youcould make money by re-forcing
(15:44):
with good trees, like walnuttrees, that they're worth a lot
of money the wood is worth a lotof money And you could at the
same time, recover the watercycle.
This was actually mentioned bythe European Commission in the
COP meeting of the UnitedNations in Cancun in the year
(16:08):
2010.
I can send you the flyerprinted by the European
Commission mentioning that youcould re-forest in selected
areas around the MediterraneanBasin to create jobs and recover
the water cycle and also avoidthe soil going down in floods
(16:29):
down towards the coast.
So all the ingredients areknown.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Are there yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
The point is that if there is anybody who wants to
listen and put the whole piecetogether, this has also been
addressed by the EuropeanCommission.
There was a scientific missionof the European Commission in
the year 2010 to the Commissionof Sciences of the United States
(16:57):
, attended by President Obama,and I can send that to you also
so you can read theirconclusions.
Please do That.
When you start divertingirrigation water to human use,
you run into the problem thatyou lose its arms, because it
(17:18):
was already published inscientific papers.
It is not just magic, but theysay the water cycle has to be
looked at its full scale.
It means from the sea all theway up to the headwaters of the
local regional valleys.
You know, in Atlantic Europe,north of the European
(17:43):
continental divide, you're luckyGod loves you because you're
mostly Protestant, i guess Andyou get 100% of your water
evaporated from the Atlantic Inthe Mediterranean as you go
towards the center of theMediterranean.
100% of the water isrecirculated, recycled within
(18:04):
the Mediterranean basin, andland use is a key component to
recycle that water.
Once that is known, you cansolve the problem.
But there are a lot of peoplewho don't want to hear that.
They just want the fast profitaround the coastal areas,
buildings and that's it.
(18:25):
And in the one water.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Hotels.
Yeah, and imagine you're on theother side.
So you are on the money makingside and you are tasked by the
European Commission or a largeinvestor to put quite a lot of
money to work.
So let's say a billion euros.
You have one billion euros,it's one with nine zeros, but it
(18:47):
needs to have a return, afinancial return, at some point.
It could be 20 years, could be25 years, could be 50 years.
Where would you start And whatwould you do if you had so much
money that you could invest?
Speaker 2 (18:59):
OK, i would go to a good balance.
Ok, if you have electric powerplants run by coal and you begin
to see that solar panels areuseful, i wouldn't fight the
(19:19):
solar panel connectors.
I would buy their shares sothat eventually I can switch
from coal to solar panels.
The same thing here, i mean youcan do development, but if you
know what you're affectinginland, you could compensate at
the same time, because some ofthose lands are abandoned, so
(19:40):
you could buy them for verylittle price And with a
reasonable amount of investment,plus the fact that the European
Commission would probablycooperate because of the
climatic impact of those changes.
So you could have the houses.
Make sure that the houses arepainted white to reflect the
(20:01):
solar heat, make sure that thehouses have plenty of trees
around, make sure that the soilis not sealed, that you put
blocks that allow some of thegrass to come through and the
water to go in and out, and, atthe same time, make a long term
investment, buying enoughhectares inland to ensure that
(20:23):
within 10 or 12 years you getback the water from the small
water cycle And that would, inturn, stabilize the other floods
and major hydrological eventsthat we are experiencing now,
which are the direct consequenceof what you have done around
the coastal areas.
(20:44):
So all it requires is that somefellows who do the investment
short and long term at the sametime Not just a short term,
because I don't care how manyhouses you build, in 10 years
they will have no water.
I mean, in the Valencia areathey would probably have water
(21:04):
restrictions, let's say withintwo years, and then they'll want
an instantaneous solution andthey go and they dissolve the
water from the sea And that onlyaggravates the problem, because
the salty water going out ofGibraltar activates something
called the Gibralto salinityvalve And that's the one that
(21:31):
makes that the English have nowfloods in summer and snowstorms
in winter.
It's all linked.
You don't perturbed the systemin one place and not expect
anything else to happen.
So if you look at the cycle atthe full cycle and that's what I
did for the European Commissionand there are a few very thick
(21:55):
reports submitted to the peoplewho are in charge at the time,
and they were the first onesconvinced that you have to try
to look at the water cycle atits proper scale And the
European Commission would havebeen willing to even finance the
recovery of the ecosystems sothat you could have agriculture.
(22:17):
Irrigated agriculture was thesubstitute of the old marshes
around the Mediterranean Basin,that you could have irrigated
agriculture with depurated wateror, once you get the
hydrological cycle working again, you could have plenty of water
for customers and for farmers.
(22:41):
The only one thing is that Onecertain river valley is capable
of if you have it working 100%.
It only is capable ofmaintaining a certain amount of
people, and that is the harshestfact.
You know, we are too many nowprobably.
So that's a philosophicalquestion.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
That's another episode and another podcast, so
I think it's fascinating whatyou're mentioning, that it's not
that we have to bring back allthe marshes.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
All I'm telling you has been published in scientific
papers and also in Europeanreports that apparently nobody
reads.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
But that's one of the points that the politicians
that don't read.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
And the other problem I have experienced ever since I
came from Canada, of which I amactually very sorry I left.
Coming to Europe was a realmistake.
At the time we thought we weregoing to do something great and
we have become dominated bypoliticians and civil servants
I'm going to use the words of ahigh European scientific person.
(23:56):
You know the most rusted civilservants, particularly in the
southern states, that don't readanything.
They probably respond to thepoliticians and even though
everything is published, theyjust don't read it.
Maybe one of the problems thatit is published in English and
many of the civil servants downhere don't speak English.
(24:18):
So anyway, the problem can besolved.
And then bring me to anotherquestion.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
actually Bring me to another question.
If there's one thing you wouldchange overnight, like you have
the magic one, so not speakingmagic, because we don't want
magic, but if there's somethingyou could change overnight, but
only one thing, what would thatbe?
Speaker 2 (24:39):
I would go back to the way the European Commission
function.
before Madame Carrefour.
She dismounted the whole ideaof getting people building up a
scientific memory as one app,from scientific officers to area
(24:59):
directors, and by doing thatshe killed the memory of the
scientific memory of theEuropean Commission.
So all these things that weknew very well in the late 90s
and early 2000s, theydisappeared because the people
who were doing those projects,they were shifted from one
(25:22):
division to another and so theygo, their memory.
So I was actually invited tobecome one area director in the
European Commission with themission of fighting off the
European Parliament and makingsure that the technology core of
(25:43):
the European Commission remain,to maintain the memory and not
go reinventing the same thingover and over and over again.
And that didn't used to be theway, but it became the way after
the early 2000s.
That's the thing I would.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Do you think something is I'm not saying
something is changing.
You've been in the space,obviously, literally space, for
a long, long time, but does itfeel different now?
Is there a small shiver of hopeor optimism you see or not Like
?
does it feel that with theattention for I see much more
(26:27):
attention for water cycles,regeneration, regenerative
agriculture, soil does it feeldifferent?
Or you say we've been throughthese cycles, i've seen this
interest and then it goes awaybecause we see something else
shining.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
It's a matter of having the people informed
properly, including the majorinvestors, and open up a little
gate to start looking long-term,long-scale.
And there are a lot of documentsprepared by the European
Commission, by DG Environmentand DG Research that suggested
(27:00):
that already back in the year2006 to the year 2012.
In fact, there was an initiativecalled Blue Print Water for
Europe where they contemplatedadopting the water framework
directive differently indifferent European countries
(27:24):
with different water problems,because one of the problems in
Europe also was another issuecalled unfair competition.
And if you were going to change, say, the water directives in
Southern Europe to take care oftheir problems, maybe there was
an unfair competition with theDutch or with the Danish, and at
(27:49):
some times people got stuckwith the concept that to start
with cannot be applied becausethe water cycle in one place is
not the same.
And then, talking aboutexamples, i worked from the very
beginning with Dutch groupsclass van Egmond, tonys
(28:12):
Schneider.
the optimization of the airquality monitoring network done
in Holland was done with thetechniques I had developed in
Canada in the 1970.
And the one thing thatimpressed me about the Dutch a
part of being tall and handsome.
and they buy from you and theysell to the profit.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
This is just audio.
There's no video here.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Okay is that they do seem to be the group in Europe
that seems to be able tomaintain continuity.
The information that comes inone leg goes to the whole system
.
Okay, many of the largeinvestments worldwide are done
(28:59):
by Dutch companies that makingenough money in their area, they
put aside a little bit of moneyto do something else, like it's
happening now with theReforestation of the Sainte-Aï
Peninsula, for instance,recovering the Bardauer Lake to
make a fishery and at the sametime trying to recover the
(29:21):
storms locally.
They have other problems withterrorism and so on.
But it also shows that bykeeping the system very aware of
how the different parts youhave one leg of the octopus you
have environmentalists, and atthe other leg of the octopus you
(29:42):
have Phillips or you haveHeineken or you have something
else, and there is acommunication through so that
they all know more or less whatthe other guys are doing.
For a long time That has beengoing on for as long as I know.
If we could copy that system inother parts of Europe, we
probably would do much better.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
And to somehow conclude, what would be your
main message to, let's say,we're doing this in a theater,
we have a room full of peoplethat work in finance, in
investing.
What would be your main messagebe Is that the think short and
long?
Or would you have anothermessage, like what would be
(30:26):
we're in stage, we're talkingabout the water cycles.
What would we want people toremember when they walk out of
that theater?
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Well, they would have to remember that the water in
the planet is the same one sincethe time of the dinosaurs, and
you see water, a lot of water,in a tropical forest or in a
tropical island.
When you see the same amount ofwater recirculated one day
(30:54):
after another, as soon as youkill the recycling mechanism,
water is gone and you get adesert.
Yet the water that was there isnow in the atmosphere, playing
a greenhouse effect, which isdirectly responsible for the
situation we're in now.
(31:14):
Co2 is just a teeny-meaty mousecompared with the water vapor
absorption bands.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
So we're getting to the interesting piece.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Okay, but that is scientifically proven.
It's just atmospheric radiationand thermodynamics.
But it's very counter.
Well, they listen to it.
Very simple If you change soil,soil belongs to somebody.
If you do something to theatmosphere, the atmosphere is
everybody's.
So it's a shared problem thatyou can do things or not, but
(31:47):
you don't tell anybody what todo with their properties.
And that was, in my point, theweakest link in the climate
change dilemma nowadays, becausethe two legs of climate change
greenhouse gases and land usechanges were known very well in
the late eight, sixties And insome United States,
(32:13):
massachusetts Institute ofTechnology report published in
1971.
It's just that, as is usual inmany cases, there is a crowd of
people that follow the leaderand they make money going to
these big meetings and so on,but they have never solved any
problem.
If you look at the reports ofthe United Nations, they have
(32:34):
been making one mistake afteranother for the last 30 years
Because their models don'tinclude the small water cycles
and other things that propagateupwards.
So if the model doesn't havethem, the model cannot tell you
what's going to happen.
So the message to the peoplethat know and have the funds is
(32:55):
they should make sure that a bigthinking body, which in this
case was European Commission atone time, should be there to
guide the actions and you candiscuss with them, like we did
at one time, to see OK, you wantdevelopment, but do it in a
wise way.
(33:16):
Make sure you interrupt thewater cycle the least possible
And, if necessary, invest alittle bit long term to recover
the system in some place wherenow it's totally abandoned And
at the end you'll haveeverything you want in the short
(33:37):
and in the long term.
But if you only think short term, you are in for troubles.
And if the some stupidpolitician comes and destroys
the memory build that within theEuropean Commission thinking
tanks, you're in for trouble.
Now most of the work is done bysubcontracting and they have
(34:00):
people who have not even readall these antique papers that
were published in the early2000s.
So we're back again at thesquare one because some
politician destroyed somethingthat took 40 years to build that
And that.
I'm very skeptical now becauseI see the politicians and let me
(34:24):
quote me on that The most andmost stupid they are, the higher
they go.
It's a pity at one time and nopoliticians were very well
trained professionally, but Ipersonally wouldn't allow
anybody to get in politicsunless he has demonstrated that
he can earn a living working insomething useful for at least 20
(34:46):
years before he goes intopolitics.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
That's a very, very good point.
Speaker 2 (34:51):
You're talking to a very old I'm going to turn 82
man who has been working in thesame area back since 1967.
So I've seen a little thing.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
You've seen it all I can identify.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
The worst problem is when you lose memory of what you
have done, what turned out okay, what didn't turn out, what
improvements you have to do andthe kind of things that you
should do, short term and longterm.
Once you lose that memory, youare reinventing the wheel time
and time again, every four yearsor so.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Which is a very, very important message, and I want
to thank you so much for cominghere, not only to share on the
water cycles, but especiallyalso to bring that message to
the audience.
Like we think in cycles andinvestors think about actually.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
I can send you the papers I'm talking to you about,
written by the EuropeanCommission.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
We can put everything in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
I can send them to you, at least for you to look,
because I'm not saying anythingnew.
I mean, we're talking aboutthat.
We're actually trying to figureout ways of financing the
recovery of all these abandonedlands to recover the
hydrological cycle, and theEuropean Commission, the people
I work with, they were willingto get the funding to do that.
(36:20):
So for a fellow working in anyarea, let's say agriculture or
housing, he could make a littleside investment long term,
supported by the EuropeanCommission.
Actually, he could be makingmoney by buying abandoned lands
(36:43):
and putting them to recover thehydrological cycle, like they
did in China.
Speaker 1 (36:47):
Making sure that the housing development has long
term water.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
Well, the housing development is done with the
proper things.
For instance, they have done itin Germany.
You have houses, you force themto have a little water
reservoir so that you get therainwater to irrigate your
plants.
Okay, they don't do that inGermany, but they don't do that
(37:11):
in Spain, which is stupid,because this is a place where
you should do that.
And the worst part about it andI'm going back about the loss of
memory is that Spain was verywell known for having a dense
network of so-called aljives.
There were natural waterstorage well, some of them
artificial, in dry lands, sothat the little bit of runoff
(37:37):
there was you could catch andyou could use for drinking or
for other purposes.
All that tradition, all thatknow-how is now gone, and it's
amazing that the Germans, afterall this discussion I mean
Holtzworth was the worlddirector in Germany and when he
(37:59):
heard what I had to say, theGerman legislation was changed
to ensure that any new housingwould have a means of storage
water to be used for the smallgarden or for the plants, and
yet in Spain, where they needthe water, they didn't do it.
So that's what I mean aboutmaking sure that they know how
(38:22):
is not lost.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
It's not lost.
yeah, and we, so there's noneed for magic.
We know how to do this.
We've done it many, many timesacross the globe.
And now it comes to thequestion do we want to, and how
do we do it at scale enough tonot, of course, amazing to water
your garden?
but it needs to be part of amuch bigger system that actually
(38:45):
restores the water cycle, which, honestly, to me still sounds a
bit like magic, like you canbring back rains.
that sounds out of this world,but it's probably what we need.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
It has been demonstrated in China for other
reasons, but they got the rainback, but still it sounds a bit
magic Like you sound so far fromour world.
Speaker 1 (39:07):
Like you can influence the weather.
Of course we do it every dayand we have done as a Keystone
species, but to be able to bringback rain it's quite a powerful
thing.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
But you can bring it down in the places where you
have three cycles very welldefined.
In Holland you have the largeAtlantic cycle, but as soon as
you go into Europe, in SouthernEurope, you have to realize that
you have three cycles The smallone.
(39:37):
The small water cycle is thesummer storms.
The regional cycle, which arethe Mediterranean cyclones, the
medikanes, as they call them now, and the Atlantic.
Basically, there is onlypresent in the areas of the
interface between the Atlanticand an European catchment basin.
(40:00):
Let me tell you something If Ihad enough money and a few years
less, i would be buying upevery single piece of land that
has been abandoned.
Many of them are difficult tobuy because they're in the hands
of the heirs of people who leftthree generations ago.
(40:22):
Try to find them and find thesignature is going to be
difficult If you have enoughmoney, you could buy them, and
then I would reforest withvegetation and adopt it to the
terrain.
I would have a tough time withecologists because they want to
do things according to a naturalsystem, and I have to remind
(40:43):
them that in Europe,particularly in Southern Europe,
there is no natural systempresent anywhere.
In the last 2000 years,beginning with the Romans,
everything has changed.
All the vegetation you see,even in the Ops, was changed to
get logs for the railroad tidesat one time.
(41:06):
The old forests of beach andfires and some of the other
things are now gone.
So what an ecologist will lookat as a natural system is one
that has been modified by 2000years old, and that would be
also another problem.
Speaker 1 (41:22):
And so it would basically be buying up, which is
a strategy, and that's muchland, not too far from the coast
, not too far from the hillstart.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
No, no, no.
As far as the headwater of theriver valley, i would buy
anywhere in the run of the sea.
The sea breeze runs 160kilometers a day, which, if you
consider that the averagemountain range around Europe is
(41:52):
about 80 to 100 kilometers offthe coast, it means that it has
enough land to go there and comeback And I would buy land
within that range as much as Icould.
Speaker 1 (42:05):
Thank you so much for sharing that.
Let's hope some people withboth the capital and, as you
said a few years last and energyto do it.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Maybe somebody does it To do it.
Speaker 1 (42:16):
yeah, because it's something that needs to be done.
So I want to thank you so muchfor your time, for sharing, for
staying in, because you don'thave to do this.
You've been in this space along time, can I add?
Speaker 2 (42:29):
something for a second, of course.
Ok, i presented these at theEuropean Parliament twice, and
one in the year 2009,.
After I made my presentationwith all the data, there was
some parliamentarian fromAustria who told me that what I
(42:51):
was saying about theMediterranean was all very
interesting, but that there weresome directives that should be
applied.
And, of course, i thought aboutit for a second.
I told them very nicely inthese words I'm afraid that you
don't have a fucking clue ofwhat you're talking about.
(43:11):
Ok, do you eat chicken?
He was very embarrassed at thetime.
He said yes, said do you go andhunt chicken every morning?
No, are there any wild chickensleft in Europe?
Two or three species, andthat's it.
But you eat chicken, don't you?
Yeah, somebody invented thechicken farm.
(43:33):
So much land, so much food, somuch water, so many chickens, so
many eggs and so many chicken.
For me, if you, all of this,had a large banquet and you eat
all the chickens in the farm thefollowing day, there are no
eggs.
The message is that you have tofarm water at its proper scale.
(43:58):
Ok, watershed by watershed, andin southern Europe you had to
do it in the small watershed.
So I think I have bored youenough with all that.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
No, no, i think it was just writing down literally
the title which you might turn.
That turns out to be the titlefarm water at its proper scale
And and the systems, and that's,i think, a very important
message.
It's not that northern Europecan just look at southern Europe
getting dry and fire and flood,as it's happening now, but it's
literally connected to thefloods over there.
(44:31):
It's literally connected to thesnowstorms in the UK.
We're all in this together ifwe like it or not, and water
might be the sort of bindingforce there.
Like it's very important totalk about soil, carbon and
biodiversity and insects, all ofthat, but maybe water is the
more, the stronger and easierconnector that we need to, the
component that will trigger allthe others.
(44:53):
I'm not saying the other impactis not there, but it might be
the one where we are most scaredof in the Netherlands to a
certain extent, or most havelearned to deal with to a
certain extent, but it'ssomething we just cannot escape.
You have either too much, toolittle or just enough, and most
of us are living in places nowwhere we not have just enough.
We either have too much or toolittle or on the wrong moment.
(45:15):
So I think it's that that's whywe're recording this series,
obviously on the water cycle.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
So absolutely no boredom, just just to finish,
what we discover in 30 someyears of work is the same thing
that the tourist and the allromantic writer Noose from the
late 1700s is that theMediterranean is different from
(45:41):
central northern Europe.
Ok, what we have done isdocument the little features
that make it be different Andbasically, that's it.
Once you know you can, you,once you have a diagnosis of
your illness, you can design atreatment that you cannot go
applying, treatments that havebeen designed for the wrong
(46:03):
patient, ok.
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