Guest post by Steven Goddard
Global warming has predictably struck again.
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 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.”
From the Scientific American Blog
River ice generated by global warming in North Dakota
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.
The river crested in Fargo at 40.82 feet (12.44 meters) shortly after midnight yesterday, never reaching the 42-foot forecast the weather service expected, which would have put it at the top of some city dikes. The crest broke the record of 40.1 feet set in April 1897.
The river was at 40.27 feet as of 4:15 a.m. local time this morning and was forecast to recede to 38.1 feet as of 1 a.m. on April 5, according to the National Weather Service.
Freezing Temperatures
Temperatures as cold as 7 degrees Fahrenheit froze water running into the river and are responsible for turning back the flood, said David Kellenbenz, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Grand Forks, North Dakota, about 80 miles north of Fargo.
The weather service had said earlier that the Red River could crest as high as 43 feet.
In fact, temperatures in North Dakota have been running about 5-10 degrees below normal for the entire winter and spring.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/hprcc/nd/Last3mTDeptHPRCC-ND.png
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/hprcc/nd/MonthTDeptHPRCC-ND.png
NOAA’s Center for Climate Prediction had incorrectly forecast a warm winter for the region last autumn.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/archives/long_lead/gifs/2008/200810temp.gif
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 : Reality must never take precedence over computer models.
Author’s Note : Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is now known as “climate change” because the scientists were just kidding when they gave it the original name.
“That’s what some scientists do, sit in their labs, plotting promotion of false premises.”
Fixed.
[And some of those scientists work at NASA/GISS.]
Finally, what’s with the ‘quote mining’ accusations? The quote was taken from the Scientific American article, which states in the very first sentence:
Now, I understand that Scientific American was bought by a pro-greenie German company a few years ago, so they try to pitch the AGW/CO2 fallacy every chance they get. But it seems the readers are smarter than the editors. For example, look at the comments below the article: click
Note the article’s title, too.
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.
dhogaza,
Sigh all you want, but you obviously don’t understand the science and have the blinkers on about Obama’s comment – which was a blatant and unambiguous suggestion that global warming is an aggravating factor in the Fargo floods.
If the average global temperature was two degrees warmer, the flooding event in Fargo most likely would not have happened. Some alarmists here have repeatedly made the point that this flood is due to La Nina, which is a cooling event – not a warming event.
Pofarmer (17:07:54) :
“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.
Well, I think you really meant that it works, just not all that well 😉 It worked for a few thousand years in the Nile for example. It’s just vastly more efficient to transport the needed fertilizers via truck… BTW, to the original poster, farmers also measure trace minerals and correct for them where appropriate too. It’s not just NPK. And large industrial farmers often do this more than small guys who are less formal about it.
I’m not endorsing either one, just pointing out what I’ve observed…
” dhogaza (15:53:40) :
It is also clear that Obama could’ve chosen his words more carefully, since it’s obvious that some people are going to intentionally misinterpret what he says in an attempt to make him look foolish.”
We shall see, dhogaza. Obama seems incapable of choosing his words, when he speaks extemp. I’m deeply afraid there isn’t a lot of data in there from which he CAN choose. No one wants him to look foolish, the real fear is that he IS foolish.
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.
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.
Smokey (16:17:07) : Now, I understand that Scientific American was bought by a pro-greenie German company a few years ago, so they try to pitch the AGW/CO2 fallacy every chance they get. But it seems the readers are smarter than the editors. For example, look at the comments below the article:
Not only were the comments generally repudiating AGW and critical of Obama calling a weather event evidence of climate… But there were all of 30 of them while this thread alone is 156 as I type!
WUWT trounces Scientific American! Way To Go!
As I child I read SciAm nearly religiously at the library in my podunk farm town. Got quite a very broad science education from it. After the sale to {whoever} when it turned into more of a marketing & propaganda machine, I gradually stopped reading it — but sometimes for free in the grocery store I’d read an article. Last time I picked it up after a cover tease, the article was so broken about AGW that I just put it back and walked away. Haven’t picked it up since and don’t even get teased by the cover while grocery shopping any more… And folks wonder why propaganda newspapers are going under right and left and propaganda magazine lose money. It’s called choice, and places like WUWT let folks like us choose truth over slick propaganda.
Game changer. Congratulations!
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.
Indiana Bones (10:29:06) : The L.A. Times photo caption: “River ice generated by global warming in North Dakota”
???
I wonder… Now if I were employed in a propaganda mill, and my editor required me to fill my quota… would I try to go passive-aggressive and slip in things like “ice generated by … warming”? MaaayBee…
Jim Cripwell (10:19:11) : You need to be very careful with this idea. Any sort of floodway increases the flooding downstream.
Um, not always… If it’s a narrow bypass channel, yes, but if it’s like the Sacramento River Bypass (Yolo Bypass per wiki though I never heard it called then when I lived there…) bypasses Sacramento, it’s miles wide and the river gets to spread out and slow way down. Suppresses the crest for the entire length of the river down stream. Think 25,500 acres (103 km2) lake 10 to 20 feet deep (3-6 m). Holds (and so delays) a lot of water.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yolo_Bypass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yolo_Causeway
The sarcastic caption under the LA Times photo is my own writing. I was just pointing out how absurd the idea of blaming this flood on global warming was.
Retired Engineer (12:00:41) : Some threads back, folks asked about pumping all this water west or at least to places with drought. Why not pump it just far enough to reach the Ogallala Aquafer?
My Gosh that makes a lot of sense. At first I thought “you crazy? Pump water to Texas?” then I looked at the map here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
You’d have to cross all of South Dakota and can hit the aquifer on the southern edge of S. Dakota or N. Nebraska. That’s very doable… Don’t know if you could add volume to the Missouri River part of the time or it if would take an added channel or humongous pipeline, but at a first glance it looks like a way good idea. During times of excess flow, divert some of the excess into the aquifer and save everyone downstream at least part of the grief.
Yeah, water rights issues, but if it’s water that’s destined to destroy & flood I can’t see too much of a fight over it. Don’t know how fast water travels through the aquifer… might need many injection / recharge points and Texas might have to wait a few decades for the water to get there. But given the alternative of some 27% or so of all irrigated farm land in the U.S.A. going thirsty while other places flood…
Has this ever been proposed before? Is there any history on something like this?
E.M.Smith (19:41:22) :
Retired Engineer (12:00:41) : Some threads back, folks asked about pumping all this water west or at least to places with drought. Why not pump it just far enough to reach the Ogallala Aquafer?
Since they can drill obliquely to extract oil, perhaps they can drill obliquely to drain water.
Brilliant!
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
Roger Sowell (12:54:33) : there are stormwater infiltration devices, which are now mandatory in California on some construction projects. These are designed as holes in the ground, filled with a permeable structure such as hollow plastic cubes. The rainwater (such as it is in California!) drains into the infiltration device, instead of into a storm drain. The water eventually percolates into the groundwater. The cost is huge, of course.
These are different from the old rock filled dry wells of my youth how?
Helped the neighbor put in a dry well to take his roof water a few decades ago. Downspout to a pipe into a 1 foot by 10? foot hole full of rocks…
Didn’t want the rain water making his lawn soggy or washing over the driveway…
E.M.Smith (18:43:12) :
The decline of SciAm is one of the saddest stories in science journalism. Like you (and the Unabomber!), I looked forward to each issue. My father subscribed to it. At the time, Mathematical Games was my favorite column. I can still do Jacob’s ladder and make hexaflexagons from adding machine tape. Questar ads! Of course, as I got older and understood the science better, I learned about electrophoresis, holograms, plate tectonics, and all the other great stuff that ws going on. When my sister moved to California, we decided to discard all those issues (except for Henry Stommel’s article on The Year without a Summer.) By then there was no point in subscribing to what the magazine had become.
I think the fall happened as Discover, Omni, and other magazines showed up aimed at a less knowledgable audience. They took advertisers from SciAm and created an environment tough for all magazines. By the time some of the upstarts had the decency to fail, SciAm as we knew was no more.
vintagejenta (07:02:54) :
Are people ever going to get it that global climate change does not automatically mean warmer weather? Weather does not equal climate, people. Climate is weather patterns over a very long period of time.
Yup, unfortunately it’s about a 1500 year time interval, not the 30 year weather pattern that the AGW folks (among others) seem to think counts as ‘climate’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1500-year_climate_cycle
Until the cause for Bond Events can be explained, any attribution of ‘climate change’ to anything other than nature is simple self delusion.
So, set your sights on things in the 3000 to 10,000 year range and we can talk about Climate Change. Anything under 1500 years is just weather, and we all know that we can’t do anything about the weather and that weather events mean nothing to climate change.
Oh, and explain these too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard-Oeschger_events
One hopes the explanation is the same as Bond Events, but you never know…
Just because it was cold this year instead of the predicted heatwave does not mean that climate change is not occurring.
Right! Climate change has happened over the entire lifetime of the planet. 4.5 billion years or so. No way to stop it, or even slow it down. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
Notice that most of the time it’s about 4-6 C colder than now, but sometimes it’s up to 4-5 C hotter than right now and it’s normal to oscillate between them on a periodic basis. Also notice that the last few thousand years have been extraordinarily stable and that it sure looks like the most probable movement after an interglacial high point is a plunge into deep cold. You are very right, we really do need to accept that climate change is coming, just not likely to the hot side! (‘Cause Fargo is not going to handle it well with a 1 km ice dam overhead…)
See? Global climate change does not equal automatically warmer temps! But it DOES mean higher and more severe precipitation. Can we all memorize that now? Thanks.
Certainly we can, and I’m fairly certain that with the PDO flip in place, with the sun hitting the snooze alarm, and with the time for the next Bond Event being, well, Any Decade Now: You will get a lot of opportunities to repeat that phrase “Global Climate change does not equal […] warmer temps!” and “higher and more severe precipitation” with emphasis on the snow part.
I’m off to go sandbag and stock up for the impending blizzard.
Good luck, and don’t forget to put up about 40 years worth of cold weather provisions and gear. You will likely need it.
BTW, your
http://citygirlcountryfood.wordpress.com/2009/02/05/comfort-food-simple-meatballs-creamy-smashed-potatoes/
recipe looks pretty good! I’ve bookmarked it and when I get time I’m going to wander through the other recipes you have. Your boyfriend is a lucky guy! (I get to do the cooking for my family, having grown up in a family restaurant… but I’ve been looking for some new ideas to freshen the menu.)
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
So on the one side, we have RWingnuts laughing because Obama is prone to stumbling a bit when speaking off-the-cuff.
And here we have you saying “read between the lines”, that his (obviously awkwardly worded) statement has some deep meaning including words he never said, like “if one degree of warming we have had so far did this”, even though he CLEARLY said you can’t attribute “this” to “that”.
REPLY: The point is that warming didn’t cause the ice dam, and I’m going to say, stop this back and forth over meanings of words. Pick a new subject. – Anthony
dhogaza (18:37:19) : I do understand the science, I’ve been aware of chaos theory (which is math, not science)
You sure about that? Really? Last chance… OK,
Math, often called “The Queen of the Sciences”…
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics
“The word “mathematics” comes from the Greek μάθημα (máthēma), which means learning, study, science, ”
Or in other words, the very name of mathematics means science…
and
“Carl Friedrich Gauss referred to mathematics as “the Queen of the Sciences”.[21] In the original Latin Regina Scientiarum, as well as in German Königin der Wissenschaften, the word corresponding to science means (field of) knowledge. Indeed, this is also the original meaning in English, and there is no doubt that mathematics is in this sense a science”
Now if you want to subscribe to the belief that math is not popperian so can be excluded from “science” that is your belief, but not very useful. Popper is one person, not God nor the sole authority on thought.
And of course there have been folks who have said that Physics is just applied Mathematics and that Chemistry is just applied Physics; so I don’t think you want to head down the path of trying to show that these are somehow dramatically different forms of thought… (We’ll skip over the assertion that Engineering is just applied Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics … )
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.
The “engineering” I do is almost purely statistics (detection theory).
Mark
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.
Since the beginning of the meteorological winter in December, Fargo, ND has had an average temperature of 11F, with at least 80% of days below normal.
http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KFAR/2008/12/1/CustomHistory.html?dayend=31&monthend=3&yearend=2009&req_city=NA&req_state=NA&req_statename=NA
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/histGraphAll?day=1&year=2008&month=12&dayend=31&yearend=2009&monthend=3&ID=KFAR&type=6&width=500
Temperatures on the Minnesota side of the ND border have also been averaging up to 10 degrees below normal this winter.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/hprcc/mn/Last3mTDeptHPRCC-MN.png
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/maps/current/index.php?action=update_daterange&daterange=Month
Note that the entire drainage of the Red River on both sides of the border has been running well below normal. Imagine the devastation that a two degree rise in temperature would bring. No wonder Obama’s teleprompter is concerned.
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
Just a brief analysis of the 20 major floods and the more frequent factors present were :
COOL PDO about 70%
COLDER THAN NORMAL TEMP 55%
PRESENCE OF LA NINA 35%
PRESENCE OF SOLAR MIN 3 FLOODS