North Dakota Floods Aggravated By "Global Warming"

That’s odd. The predictions of worst-case-scenario of extremely severe flooding were averted by unusually cold temperatures that re-froze upstream water.
The L.A. Times photo caption says it: “River ice generated by global warming in North Dakota”
Help me here . . . ice generated by global warming? Did global warming selectively choose North Dakota to assert its influence? Are abnormal freezing temperatures a good measure of global warming?

People are crazy

I live in neighboring Montana, and the flooding over in North Dakota is the predictable end of a very nasty winter there. The temperatures in that area, especially the Fargo/Grand Forks region, have been amazingly cold all winter long. They have also received much more snow than normal, I have heard. Rather than “evidence of global climate change”, this winter has been seen around here as more of a return to the tougher winters of the 60’s and 70’s. I have heard a lot of ridicule of Al Gore, too. Oh yeah, it is snowing again, and more is predicted.

Sorry…make that pronouncement…

It was true when I was in university 4 decades ago, and its still true today: engineers should never be allowed to speak in public. :)~

Sorry last comment was Off-Topic.
This post is just another in a long line of “Climate Changes causes…” We all knew this was coming, I am waiting for the Volcanic Activity in Alaska Triggered by Climate Change piece that is due out any time now.
There is a down side and that is we will get a double top when the spring melt happens. So this is not over for the year. The next peak may break this new record.
So be ready for those headlines…

I’ve been following this story a couple of days now. We all knew this statement was coming. LOL

Perhaps Kate White needs to read up on Lake Agassiz.

The title of this post is “North Dakota Floods Aggravated By “Global Warming”” yet the article you quote has 18 paragraphs only ONE of which even mentions global warming, and does not pin the blamer on global warming.
And that merits a post and a series of oh so predictable comments?
Run that by me again will you?

White said climate change caused by global warming likely is changing ice conditions and adding to the unpredictability.
Kate White is a civil engineer at the Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., and one of the nation’s leading experts on ice jams.
I like her solution to problems caused by AGW…..Dynamite!

March 29, 2009, non-climatologist Gary in Arkansas has waded into the Global Warming debate with a radical new hypothesis. Gary is a non-scientist and non-meteorologist who has brought some very interesting scientific observations into the fray.
“It’s like this,” says Gary, “everyone is familiar with a compass. There is a needle that spins around and around. We seem to be experiencing a sort of “weather compass” effect, where man-made Global Warming has gotten so bad that the dial has spun all the way around into the colder ranges.” Gary goes on to say that many things in life are similar, like the famous board game Monopoly. If you roll the dice too high – you go past “Go.”
“I have submitted my data to Mr. Al Gore and he found the results quite scientific,” says Gary. “I really just want to get this out to other scientific-minded fellows. I just want to make a name for myself, I mean, I think this global warming thing has gotten way out of hand.
Gary’s hypothesis has scary implications. “Yeah, think about it. It’s obvious to me, by using my models, that the warming has gone on for so long that we’ve moved way beyond simple heating. We’re now into cooling. So even if were to cool the earth using the brave tactics being put forth, we’d actually cool down back into the warming area. I feel the measures being looked at haven’t taken this into account. We need even more stringent measures to reverse what mankind has done.”
[Shoot, y’all, see how easy this science stuff is? Any yahoo can get into it!][WINK]

The actual quote for the LA Times photo is as follows:
“The North Dakota National Guard hauls volunteers by truck through floodwaters in Oxbow. In one Fargo neighborhood, mandatory evacuations were ordered after cracks were found in an earthen levee.”
Anyone curious can follow the link that was included in the caption.

it’s la nina, just like in ’96-’97
O/T
I like all the ad hom/strawman I read on this site, gives credence to that whole science thing.
Ben

Peter Hearnden (10:02:33) :
“The title of this post is “North Dakota Floods Aggravated By “Global Warming”” yet the article you quote has 18 paragraphs only ONE of which even mentions global warming, and does not pin the blamer on global warming.
And that merits a post and a series of oh so predictable comments? ”
Well, yeah. Because we see so many oh so predictable “It’s global warming” comments in the MSM. This is just a tiny, no-influence blog from Anthony Watts. Hardly the epitome of balance for the big time AGW campaign. And note:
The L.A. Times photo caption: “River ice generated by global warming in North Dakota”
???

White said officials have tried several methods of predicting ice jams but what scientists really need for the job is a full understanding of various site-specific conditions, because ice jams have unique circumstances and characteristics. Time and money are barriers to that, she said.
Money?

“The title of this post is “North Dakota Floods Aggravated By “Global Warming”” yet the article you quote has 18 paragraphs only ONE of which even mentions global warming, and does not pin the blamer on global warming.”
Peter, how does this article even deserve “ONE” mention of Global Warming. You really miss the whole point of this posting by a mile. You need to open your eyes and recognize that lately any article on any natural (and even man-made sometimes) disaster somehow has at least “ONE” mention of global warming. It makes me wonder if these writers are working on an AGW commission, with bonus pay for coming up with the most outlandish and creative connection to Global Warming.

And this is what happens when you build cities, towns, and villages on flood plains. They’re called flood plains for a reason.
Ever notice that on some farms located on flood plains, the farming families have, over time, built up the area where their homes & barns are built.

Jim,
Manitoba made a conscious choice to sacrifice farmland south of Winnipeg in order to protect the city. The floodway has been in place long enough that the farmers have to accept as the price of owning that land. If you brought in a new floodway there would have to be compensation given to minority that are sacrificed in order to protect the majority but the cost would be a fraction of the costs of building these ad hoc dikes and the repairs when they are breached.
That said, my main point is we can and should focus on adapting to any climate change instead of wasting resources trying to stop what may be unstoppable.

Emotions affecting data?
Poor dear thermometer it’s cold. Here have a knitted warmer.

Peter Hearnden (10:02:33) :

The title of this post is “North Dakota Floods Aggravated By “Global Warming”” yet the article you quote has 18 paragraphs only ONE of which even mentions global warming, and does not pin the blamer on global warming.

White said climate change caused by global warming likely is changing ice conditions and adding to the unpredictability.
These are weasel words. The situation has been building throughout the season. By subscribing to the notion that our climate or seasonal weather are predictable, they may have been negligent in their duty to show due diligence to the prevailing conditions.
Should anyone be to blame? Probably not.
They are not super human and some conditions you can’t control or predict. Did they do a good job when the problem became critical? This is something for the people of North Dakota to decide.
Any hint that global warming or climate change is in anyway responsible is to diminish their expertise and that could lead to a culture of blame and excuses.
It has happened and it may happen again. The people of North Dakota need to plan ahead and take appropriate actions that will limit the damage to it’s community.
This does not involve destroying it’s industries or denying themselves access to rapidly deployable energy.

This flooding was increased by what happened this winter. The ground froze earlier than usual, reducing the amount of water absorbed by the soil from fall until now. Continued cold during the winter kept it that way. With the solid stage set, the heavy snowfall arrived to begin the performance. The sun returned from the south, and the show began.
A long cold winter gives more time for a lot of snow to accumulate. For similar floods to happen in warm weather, there would have to be a hurricane’s worth of heavy rains in the spring.

The “great global warming” of 1897 is very well documented… however the co-relation between flood crest and CO2 concentration is not that clear… More work is needed and a new super computer too…

Here’s the feedback page for US Army cold Research region for inquiries on their expertise and credentials in Oceanography, Meteorology, Climatology, etc..
http://www.crrel.usace.army.mil/crrel/feedbackform.html

Who would have thunk it, building your home on a flood plain, next to a river that is historically prone to flooding, and your home gets flooded! Not the result of poor judgement of course, pass the buck onto “Global warming” (or is it called climate change now?, I can never remember) .

Has anyone bothered to find out about Lake Agassiz? Look at it’s size, location and timeframe of existence. You will no longer be wondering why the Red River is flooding. Like a religion, one has to turn a blind eye to so much history (fossil records, etc. ) to believe the “climate change” doctrine.

See here for links to a very nice USGS poster about the history of Red River flooding and its causes. The “landform factors” and “Weather factors” mentioned in the poster are laid out in the post and addressed one by one. The bottom line: Extremely high precipitation in the fall saturated the soil. Then temperatures dropped to record lows in mid-December through mid March. Then the temperatures rose to above normal for about two weeks in the last half of March.
The Red River finally crested at about 40.8 feet, slightly higher than the previous record of 40.1 feet in 1897. I think that even Barack Obama would agree that the 1897 flood was not due to global warming. So where is it between 40.1 feet and 40.8 feet that global warming becomes obviously responsible?
Best regards
ClimateSanity

Obviously, the entire AGW – Climate Change – Climate Chaos is a scam.
Ice dams will and will not occur – Ms. White seems totally clueless from what has be reported… Anthony has proved that AGW data lacks credibility and he has created a reasoned forum on climate.
Slightly off the topic…
Sensibly, cities and towns should NOT be rebuilt on FLOOD Plains… flood plains should be used to grow crops as the rivers naturaly flood and deposit minerally rich soil. The crops pull the minerals from the soil and w eat them… much, much better than corporate farms with NPK only – the plants look good but have very little food value.

“So where is it between 40.1 feet and 40.8 feet that global warming becomes obviously responsible?”
Well put.

If Obama actually said the following his ignorance scares the hell out of me
President Obama has also weighed in.
“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating. … If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota, and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of 2 degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there,’ that indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.”
Is he just playing politics thinking appeasing warmers gets votes or does he really believe this. Science could not have been his best subject. This makes me seriously question his knowledge of world affairs.

“So where is it between 40.1 feet and 40.8 feet that global warming becomes obviously responsible? ”
This question is sooo obvious. 0.7 feet (8.4 inches) is roughly 25% of the value the IPCC predicted the seas would rise. The models predicted this. The sea-level rise won’t be a full frontal assault, we will be outflanked by the rivers. Sheesh, don’t you read the papers?
[sarcasm off]

Steven,
Thank you for the article.
One remark though!
When the winter seaon started, the flooding area was hit by days of heavy rain.
The area was saturated with water when the cold came in.
Now the snow is melting, instant run off of water takes place.
The pre winter saturation and the amount of melting snow is the factual cause of the floods.
Global Warming has nothing to do with it.
There is no Global Warming.
Today Obama announced an International Forum on Energy and Climate to be held in Washington, April this year.
His target is to make a success of the Copenhagen UN Climate Meeting in December.
If they succeed our economies will be hit by an “Atomic Bomb”.
Let’s stop this idiot.

Jim notes…
“You need to be very careful with this idea. Any sort of flood way increases the flooding downstream. Winnipeg is lucky in that Lake Winnipeg is very close to the outlet of the flood way, so there is not much left of the Red River to flood. If you put a flood way just around, for example, Fargo, heaven help the people immediately downstream.”
I think the point is that a flood way provides more channels and diverts around population centers, you do not have to terminate them back into the river so they flood others, you divert to other areas, like lets say municipal and agricultural reservoirs and the like.
Winnipeg was lucky they have the lake as a terminus, but really do you want me to believe that the only viable flood control system only would simply pass it down the line?

A lot of people have spent a lot of time building dikes around their homes…now that they are them…

… fill in the space and have the house raised.
After Galveston was hit by a hurricane in 1900, the city was raised. 2,100 buildings were raised by as much as 17 feet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galveston_Hurricane_of_1900#Aftermath

It’s becoming obvious that Obama has no ability to think in terms of math or science. He’s at the mercy of the tabloid pseudo social scientists. In addition he’s lacking a bullsh*t meter.
We can’t see his school records, maybe he took no math or real science.
Heaven Help Us!

This paper by Pinter et al. last year looked at floods in the Mississippi River system and concluded that “the largest and most pervasive contributors to increased flooding on the Mississippi River system were wing dikes and related navigational structures, followed by progressive levee construction.”
Flood trends and river engineering on the Mississippi River system
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008GL035987.shtml

Using AGW logic, it all makes perfect sense. The models forecast a warm winter. The models were wrong, and instead it was extremely cold and snowy. All that late melting snow caused a flood, so the flood must be blamed on the global warming predicted by the models. AGW Commandment #1 :
UK winter of 1947, it was extremely cold and snowy, all that late melting snow caused a flood, was that AGW, just weather.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/1947winter.gif
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/NottsFloods1947.jpg
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gesc_b/Pages/Index.html

Find the following text using Google. You will be surprised!!!!!!! See how yesterday’s arguments were the same that are used today to reinforce the opposite idea!!! Even the burn of fossil fuels is there.
“In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada’s wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone’s recollection.”

People are crazy

… and just plain dumb.

Hmmm, what has the effect been on winter crops?

You don’t have to tell me about the ”departure from normal” temperatures in ND this winter:
I spent the last 3 months in far northern ND, right there in one of the 6-to-8 degrees BELOW normal bands. We had a 3-day blizzard last week; was snowed in for several days. After getting down into single digits above zero again last night, FINALLY today it made it into the mid-30s above.
So WRT a little ”global warming”, all I can say is:
BRING IT ON !!…. please…..

My cousin has been doing insurance claim settlements in New Orleans. He told me about the 4″ of snow they had.
The South, paralyzed with snow.
Good grief. GSM.

http://www.msc-smc.ec.gc.ca/education/lanina/canadian/region/index_mean_e.cfm?region=prairies
This is an excellent web page maintained by the Meterological Services of Canada. It shows how La Nina Conditions affect the winter weather in the Canadian Prairie Provinces adjacent the Red River area. Similar weather pattern existed south of the border.

Even with a cold PDO and La Nina, it does not help to have comatose Solar Activity added on top of it. That’s putting the cart before the horse, as the biggest kid should be leading, but there be no acceptance of the Sun affecting climate on Earth, there is no evidence.
Just looney-tunes models.
Goofy and Baby Huey call the shots.

Obama made his ill-informed (gibbering) statement while trying to sell Dakotans on his multi-trillion dollar cap-and-trade tax that will bankrupt N and S Dakota (and the rest of the country, too) and leave the residents with no power and no means to forestall or mitigate floods, which, as has been pointed out, are a common occurrence in the flat plains of Glacial Lake Agassiz.
The remedy proffered by the President is no remedy at all but instead an enormous back-breaker impediment to the economy and to public health and safety. He got the science wrong on purpose, because science is now just a propaganda tool, and he got the economics wrong on purpose because economics are a joke to party in power.

Just when I think we’re making progress. I was watching some Mt. Redoubt video’s on youtube. And somehow, the comments in one turned to Arctic warming. On idjit claimed that “In my town it used to be 70 or 80 degrees in the summer, now it’s over 100!!! We’re all gonna die!(I just added that last). What a bunch of Maroons.

Hey Steven.
I understood what you were doing with the caption, and only wanted to clear it up for the person who seemed to have misinterpreted it.
Good post…

Well Mr. President the Red River flows north into Canada and eventually into Hudson Bay but it can’t because there is still ice on the Red River in Canada, which acts as a dam and won’t let the water pass. So if it were 2 degrees warmer in Manitoba, probably nothing would change, but lets say it was 10 degrees warmer, then there would be NO FLOODING in Fargo.
So you are right, this flood has nothing to to do with Global Warming, it has everything to do with ICE not melting. It happens every spring to some degree, but it is worse after a harsh winter like this one.
http://minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/2009/03/never-let-a-good-crisis-go-to-waste.html

“I’ve never lived west of Ohio, but apparently one of the problems is that the flood plains is miles wide so to be out of the flood plain is to be miles away from one’s livelihood. Less of a problem now than it was before cars.”
I have lived in the west, CA specifically. There was a lake bed in the desert I lived in that would fill every time it rained significantly, and these little creatures (spade-footed toad & brine shrimp), would rise out of the desert floor, lay their eggs, and their spawn would return to wait for the next rain. Isn’t it odd how life can bloom in the harshest of climes?

Maybe the head line should read, Mini-Ice Age aggravated by human intervention

let me splain how dis wurks. Cold makes snow and ice fall, snow and ice turn to water, water mixes with soil, volume of water expands.
If you have 19 feet of snow and ice you get Katrina level water event.

Wandering OT….thanks to the concept of a north flowing river in spring.
Does anyone attempt to calculate the volume of river silt filling the coastal floors and building new land? How much silt is now restrained by dams? How much silt used to get deposited on farmland before flood control and levees?
Is there really new water being added to our atmosphere from comet debris? How much?
Do hot little iron meteorites pepper the seas with fertilizer?
What parts of the oceans get deeper and wider from shifting tectonic plates? Surely as continents get slowly uplifted or sink, ocean capacity would change. Volcanoes belching forth the inner earth into the seas surely change the volumes. Who’s measuring this stuff?
Is much of Greenland really sunk below sea level now due to the weight of the ice so if it melted it would be the same as Arctic salt water ice in volume?
Surely the collapse of the Atlantic cod fisheries has reduced ocean volume. Haha.
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.

Robert Bateman
You make a very valid observation about the sun being at low activity and not helping at the present the flood situation. This is the second reason I think cooler climate may prevail for the next 2-3 decades. The current solar projections are calling for quite low solar cycles for the next two soalr cycles [20 -25 years]. During the last negative PDO CYCLE we had the benefit of the strongest solar cycle in modern times , namely # 19 . With no such extra solar boost for the next 20-30 years , plus a negative or cool PDO and more cooler La Nina’s , and a cool or negative AMO as well ,the central US high plain states and Canadian Priries will get more frequent cold weather and a greater risk of more snow than normal,and when this all melts in the spring, more frequent floods . Yet the sad part about all this is that instead of preparing for this future risk [putting more infrastructure money into flood controls [like Winnipeg, Canada did in the past after they had a devastating flood], people arebeing urged by the government to prepare for unprecedented global warming and the money is going to areas like to replace perfectly good power plants that do not need to be replaced with expensive nuclear power plants that have even a greater risk to humanity on the long run. Very expensive carbon storage is another dead end approch draining money for a useless purpose.

Just barely broke the record from 1897. Global warming in 1897 caused the river to be just as high? Wonder if the man-made structures, levees, sandbagging, and the like, helped the river make this record crest. Were these structures in place in 1897? If not, would the 1897 flood have been higher than this one with those structures in place?

Brian.D
PDO records show 1897 was also negative or cool PDO year like 2009 .Back then probably fewer people lived along the flood plain and the risk was perhaps smaller.

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/lanina/tdist/fmaninatc.gif
mostly cool or negative PDO years.Notice the cold areas

vintagejenta ,
Note that NOAA’s climate prediction center forecast a warm winter for you. That should give you a lot of confidence in the models behind the AGW theory you have embraced.

It would appear to me that the AGW supporters have confused the climate /weather language somewhat. First they used the term GLOBAL WARMING and predicted unprecedented warming starting immediately [0.21C in each of the next two decades ]. When this proved to be in error several years ago and the planet started to cool instead , the term was switched to CLIMATE CHANGE . We are now asked to stop climate change. Well climate change has been with us ever since records were kept and natural climate variability is the name of the game on this planet . You cannot stop it. Every natural weather and climate event like this flood or the latest drought in California, if only slightly more severe than the last one, is falsely blamed on manmade greenhouse gases .Now that this latest term is being proven to be wrong as well, a new term is being used REDUCE THE CARBON PRINT. This term will also prove to be wrong as Nature knows how to deal with excess carbon.It is not a threat . It has done so well before we came on the planet. However they have forgotten the term REDUCE POLLUTION which was the legitiamate fight until the global warming sidetracked everyone and which involves real pollutants like NOX, SO2, CO, GROUND LEVEL OZONE, SMOG, LEAD and particulate matter. These kill people. When were lower targets for these real pollutants last discussed in the headlines . Weather we are talking about short term or long term , reducing real pollutants should be our battle. Becoming aware of natural climate cycles that cause floods like the one this year and learning how to better prepare for them is also a worthy goal instead of chasing dead end goals like reducing carbon.

Re the comments regarding building in a flood plain. Fortunately or unfortunately, the best farmland is located in flood plains, the rich soil being deposited as flood sediment over time. Flood plain land is also the most easily irrigated because it’s the closest to the level of the river that runs through it. The best harbors for unloading ships are also, gulp, usually located on flood plains.
To those who continually comment that anyone who lives where fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. may occur: please tell me where this magical location exists that has no potential for any of the above scenarios, and we can all live there, although we’ll probably all starve to death.

http://facstaff.unca.edu/chennon/classes/atms223/ppt/climatic_oscillations.ppt#298,44,Slide 44
SLIDE #44 Well illustrates why there is more rain, snow and cold during the current cool PDO and winter La Nina for the northern US states and the Canadian western provinces. These events have been happening for hundreds of years.

Nice one mate! … Keep ‘em up … my blog is at http://abhi.com.np/blog/
Please do review it too and give me some comments on it too.

Obama didn’t say that global warming caused the flooding.
The context was that slightly cooler weather than expected friday or saturday (I forget when precisely) had led to a forecast that the river would crest slightly lower than feared earlier.
Obama’s comment, ‘If you see an increase of 2 degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there’ is a perfectly reasonable “what if?” question given that situation. If it were 2 degrees warmer, presumably the river would’ve crested higher as earlier feared, possibly breaching the sandbagged barriers.

In fact your own post supports his hypothetical “what if?” question when you state:

The Red River in Fargo, North Dakota had been expected to crest as high as 43 feet on Saturday, but instead it peaked at less than 41 feet due to freezing springtime temperatures.

We do need to be aware that relatively small changes in temperature can have surprisingly significant side-effects.

WWS: Yep, you got it about right! Except for tornadoes and that last bit there (the “anything bad”). Tornadoes I’m pretty sure have not shown any significant increase due to global climate change.
However, the others are all true because climate change rearranges weather patterns. So it makes sense that if some areas are extra-wet, it makes other areas extra-dry!
It should be noted, however, that global climate change does not CAUSE hurricanes, it only makes them stronger.
See how easy it is?
And to all those who say most of Fargo should be wiped off the face of the planet because it’s in the way of the river, does that also mean we should remove everyone who lives on or near a fault line, a volcano, a mountain (avalanches and rock falls and mud slides, oh my!), the ocean (hurricanes and white squalls!), or in Tornado Alley needs to move, too? And might I ask WHERE you propose to put all these people?
Flooding is something that happens every year and we’ve dealt with it since Fargo was established. So why don’t you worry about your own little selves. We’re not asking for your help. We chose to live here, we’ll deal with it.

Wow, okay, don’t mean to be commenting so much, but I just read another comment regarding rain vs. snow (as in the “2 degrees warmer” thing would give us rain, not snow).
I don’t know if most people understand why the Red floods every year, so I’m going to explain it.
Much like the Nile, the Red flows north. With the Nile, it floods because there was spring melt in the mountains and rains to swell it. In the Red River Valley, it’s because the southern part melts first, meaning that extra water gets held up by the still-frozen waters north of it. So even if we didn’t get that extra snow from those two terrible blizzards that shut down the city, the Red still would have flooded. And if that precip had been rain instead of snow, the Red STILL would have flooded, maybe just as bad.
A little rain is not going to melt foot-thick ice on the river. And the Red freezes over every winter because, and let’s be honest, it gets FRICKING COLD up here (-20 temps with -40 windchill were pretty common this past winter).
SO, even if the snow had been rain, it probably would have just pooled on top of the already-saturated ground, covering an already full water table (remember the rain last fall?), making a big mess until the river ice melted and it could all flow north to Lake Winnipeg and then to the Hudson Bay.
So can we PLEASE stop speculating on what MIGHT have happened and focus on the present? It flooded really effing badly because we got a heckuva lot of precip over the fall and winter. Maybe some of that extra precip was worsened by global climate change, maybe it wasn’t. But they call it a 100 year flood for a reason (1897, 1997, hey look! 100 years! Wait, 2009?! That’s only 12!). And for 100 year floods to be happening twice with just over a decade between them, that’s not normal, I don’t care if you “believe” in gloal climate change or not.
And now I’m going to stop ranting.

And for 100 year floods to be happening twice with just over a decade between them, that’s not normal, I don’t care if you “believe” in gloal climate change or not.
Someone should buy this climate a calender, It’s obviously functioning out of sink with our concept of time and doing all sorts of naturally variable silly things. 🙂

Temperatures have been running 5-10 degrees below normal all winter. If the temperature was 2 degrees warmer as Obama mused, it would be 3-8 degrees below normal.
Using AGW logic, normal temperatures would cause Noah’s flood.

And, using your logic, those professionals who predicted the flood would crest slightly lower because of slightly cooler than forecast temperatures were wrong, eh?

Temperatures have been running 5-10 degrees below normal all winter.

Stephen, is february part of winter?

dhogaza,
If the average temperature of the earth was two degrees warmer, “THIS SITUATION” (5-10 degrees below normal) wouldn’t be happening. Read up on chaos theory here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Glad to help out.

dhogaza ,
Obama’s statement indicated a thorough lack of understanding of the science, as do yours.

‘If you see an increase of 2 degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?

If the world was two degrees warmer, “the situation” in Fargo would not be happening. Read the paragraph below carefully.
An early pioneer of chaos theory was Edward Lorenz whose interest in chaos came about accidentally through his work on weather prediction in 1961.[14] Lorenz was using a simple digital computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to run his weather simulation. He wanted to see a sequence of data again and to save time he started the simulation in the middle of its course. He was able to do this by entering a printout of the data corresponding to conditions in the middle of his simulation which he had calculated last time.
To his surprise the weather that the machine began to predict was completely different from the weather calculated before. Lorenz tracked this down to the computer printout. The computer worked with 6-digit precision, but the printout rounded variables off to a 3-digit number, so a value like 0.506127 was printed as 0.506. This difference is tiny and the consensus at the time would have been that it should have had practically no effect. However Lorenz had discovered that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome.[15] Lorenz’s discovery, which gave its name to Lorenz attractors, proved that meteorology could not reasonably predict weather beyond a weekly period (at most).

M.WHITE
You think that extra record snow and the flooding risk in the ALPS is very real, just note this. With all the extra snow and cold temperatures for the last several years in Canada where the Prairie winter temperatures dropped some 7.1c degrees since 2006 , this just came out of an AGW den http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090330.BCGREEN30/TPStory/Environment
You just can’t win sometime.

dhogaza (11:25:20) :
Obama’s comment, ‘If you see an increase of 2 degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there’ is a perfectly reasonable “what if?” question given that situation. If it were 2 degrees warmer, presumably the river would’ve crested higher as earlier feared, possibly breaching the sandbagged barriers.
“Perfectly reasonable” by whose reasoning – yours? There is only one reason for asking that “what if” question, and that is AGW alarmism. It’s a completely rhetorical question, based on the false premise that A) we are warming at an alarming and unprecedented rate, and 2) man is primarily responsible via his contribution of C02.

“Perfectly reasonable” by whose reasoning – yours?

By applying the same logic that slight regional cooling caused the river to crest a foot or so lower than the best estimate made the day before.

It’s a completely rhetorical question, based on the false premise that A) we are warming at an alarming and unprecedented rate, and 2) man is primarily responsible via his contribution of C02.

Science is known for the promotion of false premises, I agree. That’s what scientists do, sit in their labs, plotting promotion of false premises.

Sensibly, cities and towns should NOT be rebuilt on FLOOD Plains… flood plains should be used to grow crops as the rivers naturaly flood and deposit minerally rich soil. The crops pull the minerals from the soil and w eat them… much, much better than corporate farms with NPK only – the plants look good but have very little food value.
I’m sorry folks, that just does NOT work.

If the average global temperature was two degrees warmer

Point me to the part where he said “average global temperature”.
Please.
Point me to the part where “this situation” refers to this mythical “all winter which has been 5 to 10 degrees lower than normal”.
I do understand the science, I’ve been aware of chaos theory (which is math, not science) for decades, I know that long-term weather (as opposed to climate) forecasts are an impossible nut to crack due to the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, and I know that none of this has anything to do with the fact that *if* the temps along the Red River had been two degrees warmer this weekend, *then*, if the forecasters are to be believed, the river might well have crested the 43 foot sandbagged barriers, causing much more extensive flooding than occurred.
He was using the local situation as an illustration that small changes in temperature shouldn’t be hand-waved away as being unimportant.

Temperatures have been running 5-10 degrees below normal all winter.

Where. February is winter, I pasted a link above that shows this is a false statement for February in the United States, and in particular in MN.

dhogaza,
Pretend for a minute that (as you were suggesting) Obama was talking about a local two degree increase in temperature, rather than a global increase (which is what he obviously was talking about.) That would mean North Dakota was 3-8 degrees below normal instead of 5-10 degrees. What on earth does that have to do with global warming?
Read between his lines. What he was saying is “if the one degree of warming we have had so far did this, imagine what another two degrees of warming would do.”
Obama dodged criticism all through the campaign by not being precise on many topics, but it was always obvious where he stood – to anyone who was willing to listen and think. This is no exception.

Heads Up Folks.
Apparently all that Global Warming is about to deliver a Blizzard to North Dakota.
Ref: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25269271-2703,00.html

Pretend for a minute that (as you were suggesting) Obama was talking about a local two degree increase in temperature, rather than a global increase (which is what he obviously was talking about.)

Quit lying. It’s clear he was relating a global increase to a local one, as an *analogy*, an *example*. “look what a 2 degree increase would do to THIS SITUATION (Red River, Fargo, local stream forecasters saying that the eventual crest hight was highly sensitive to local temps).
Pretend for a moment that you were honest, and hadn’t quote-mined him in the first place.
Damn, I can’t.
REPLY: Don’t call others liars just because they present a different viewpoint. – Anthony

E.M.Smith (22:12:53) :
….
Popper is an interesting guy with some interesting ideas, but there is no need to put his straight jacket on your mind and call it truth.
Personally I found Popper a rather dry read, and I take a position that Thomas Kuhn (of “The Copernican Revolution”, Paradigm Shifts, etc) has a better take.
However, I really like the idea that Science should be Falsifiable. A characteristic that is typically missing in action in the current AGW movement.

Thanks Gary Pearse for that PDF. It helps put things into perspective on Red River flooding.
Basically, it has flooded bad before, and sometimes frequently. And what is happening now is no different than the past.
What is different is the all the man-made structures (flood controls) which can skew the data for flow rates. So estimates have to be done for comparisons from before flood control measures. In this case, all data after 1968 is estimated. Data prior to 1875 is also estimated. But that’s all we got, and have to use it. Wonder how skewed the heights are now from before flood control measures (permanent and temporary)? A 40ft flood without flood controls (allowing the river to spread out), and a 40ft flood now are not the same. Estimate the 40ft now to what it would be naturally would not be so high. Maybe by a couple feet, I don’t know.
The one thing that makes floods, and all natural disasters so devastating is the amount of infrastructure, and people in the way of them, now. It’s why they seem so much worse. The 1826 flood was the largest on record (in the Winnipeg area). It didn’t effect near the people, but was just as devastating to them, and their property. AGW theory would have been tempting to accept, then, as it is now.
Labeling events as 100yr, 500yr is extremely misleading, IMO. You can get a series of major events in one man’s lifetime, yet another man’s life may not see that many. Matter of perspective, than factual. Records are more spotty prior to the 20th century.
Here are the years with flow rates of 3000 m3/s or better up to 1998. Maybe there are records for 1999-2008 somewhere. But I’ll list what was given from the PDF.
1811 – 3171
1826 – 6371
1850 – 3002
1852 – 4672
1861 – 3540
1950 – 3058
1979 – 3030
1996 – 3058
1997 – 4587

Thanks for the great article and the pdf file. i would like to post about it to my blog http://abhi.com.np/blog/

I meant to say maximum flow of 30,000 which is 850m3/sec at FARGO

E.M.Smith (11:27:47) :
Just a small update on the Fargo Bypass idea. from:
http://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/nd/nwis/uv/?site_no=05054000&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060
we get that the delta from ‘very high’ to ‘record flood’ is about 10,000 cfs.
That’s a capacity almost the same as the California Aqueduct. So a concrete ditch about 20 feet x 150 feet (or 30 x 100) would carry all the ‘flood excess’ past Fargo. What’s that, 20 miles? Almost trivial in size compared to the California aqueduct. That’s the ‘cost of mitigation’…
For the inevitable complaint about the downstream effects:
ALL that water is going downstream anyway. Unlike a levee (that makes it worse) a bypass adds capacity, slows velocity, lowers the peak (downstream too!) and restores some of the natural ’spreading out’ behaviour (it just does it in a controlled place and time). So it makes it better downstream, not worse.
I do like the idea of using a tunnel boring machine to put the whole thing underground, but it adds a lot of cost…
Great Ideas,
Lets build a toolkit for deealing with the following;
Flooding adjacent to rivers:
If flood stage is low enough AND there is enough land available, low lndscaped berms could be built around the structures… with a removable floodgate allowing access.
If flood stage is higher than berms can handle, stuctures could be raised to above expected flood levels – except that accessibility for function and ADA would present another issue.
If flood stage is higher than berms can handle and we desire to actually use the structures after modification – we have two choices – move the strctures out of the way of the water OR move the water out of the way of the structures.
I see great benefits to moving the water and letting it silt out its minerals to form more growing land, and eventually provide drinking water.
I certainly hope farmers are replacing all of the 70 some odd minerals in the soil, unfortunately I do not think that they are, why not let mother nature take care o the issue for us.
Obviously, attempting to use ‘historical’ flood data without considering physical changes over time is just as ridiculous as neglecting heat islands in temperature measurements.
We could build a few more great ditches to siphon off EXCESS water in wet years, but we need to be very careful so that we allow all downstream human, animal and vegetable life to continue normally.
I agree that the entire ‘Climate Change’ phenom is little more than a massive distraction from REAL issues that require REAL TALENT to solve… the talent needs to come back in from the Mann-Hansen-Obama-Gore-UNIPCC Lunacy and get back on a real discussion based on science –
Back to designing buildings.