Friday afternoon, the Red River of the North reached unprecedented flood levels in Fargo, North Dakota, twenty-four hours before it is expected to crest. Last night, President Obama added “seven northwest Minnesota counties” to the federal emergency already declared in North Dakota as “Fargo and Moorhead teeter on the brink of disaster” from this “historic flood.” The Red River has been in flood in Fargo since last Saturday. The United States Geological Survey river gage at Fargo — which has continuous flow data since 1902 — recorded new records in both streamflow (28,900 cubic feet per second) and height (40 3/4 feet) at 4:15 PM EST. Enough water is flowing through the Red River right now to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every three seconds, 48 times the normal rate:

STREAMFLOW: 28,900 cfs

FLOOD HEIGHT: 40.73 ft

This is the eighth “ten-year flood” of Fargo since 1989, with streamflow greater than 10,300 cfs. That is to say:

In the last twenty years, Red River floods expected to occur at Fargo only once every ten years have happened every two to three years. 2009 is the third year in a row with at least a “ten-year flood.” In the 90 years before 1990, there were only eight ten-year floods.

ANNUAL PEAK FLOW, RED RIVER OF THE NORTH AT FARGO, ND

The standard for a hundred-year flood of the Red River of the North at Fargo set by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2001 is 29,300 cfs, a discharge rate never yet recorded.

A key consequence of global warming predicted by climate scientists is an increase in overall precipitation as well as extreme precipitation events, leading to increased flooding. As President Obama warned on Monday:

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.

Inside a nuclear power plant 10 miles southeast of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital, the first of a series of pumps supplying vital cooling water to the reactor unaccountably “tripped,” or shut down, at 36 seconds after 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979.

The tense, sometimes terrifying week that followed, marked by official confusion and “surreal” misstatements about the crisis’s severity, became known forever as the Three Mile Island accident, named after the reactor site on the Susquehanna River.

So opens the Greenwire (subs. req’d) story, the source for my headline. Now the nuclear power industry is trying to make a comeback, 30 years after the event that defined it for a generation.

But the legacy of TMI looms. As Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner, has noted:

The abiding lesson that Three Mile Island taught Wall Street was that a group of N.R.C.-licensed reactor operators, as good as any others, could turn a $2 billion asset into a $1 billion cleanup job in about 90 minutes.

Nuclear power has many, many other limitations:

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The electric power industry would be affected more than any other by a major climate bill. So the industry’s position on climate legislation is worth understanding. Consider this post weekend reading on the subject.

As Peter Darbee, CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric, testified to Congress in 2007:

If we do not act now, the U.S. will miss the opportunity the become a technology leader, improving our competitiveness, while at the same time increasing the risks that dramatic climate change will occur, stressing both our economy and our citizens.”

To the extent that the power industry speaks with one voice — which as we will see it doesn’t (see article reprinted at the end) — it is represented by Edison Electric Institute here, which offers these principles:

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Concentrated solar-thermal power (CSP) is a core climate solution. It is probably the zero-carbon form of electricity with the most potential, since it can be easily integrated with thermal storage and provide power reliably throughout the day and evening in key locations around the world (including China and India), which is why it delivers 3 of the 12 – 14 wedges needed for “the full global warming solution.”

After being neglected for nearly 2 decades, CSP is finally coming of age with major new deals around the world and here at home (see “Biggest CA utility contracts for world’s biggest solar power deal — 1300 MW solar thermal“). But while we tend to think of CSP as being the most suitable for desert-like conditions, it also makes sense anywhere it is sunny.

As the headline suggests, Lauren Engineers & Contractors and Florida Power & Light Co. (FPL) signed a contract on Thursday to build a 75-megawatt concentrated solar thermal facility near Indiantown, Florida (artists’s conception above).

According to a press release, the project, christened the Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center, would be second only to a 100-megawatt facility that was recently given the green light in California, and is slated to be up and running by either the end of 2009 or the second quarter of 2010 [Note to FPL: You have two different in-service dates listed on your website].

A couple of facts to note:

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[Note: I have tried to link to the relevant literature on extreme precipitation trends. If I've missed any, let me know.]

“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating,” Obama told reporters Monday. “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 two degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’ That indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.“

Besides Obama, the British and the Chinese understand global warming has driven their record flooding. The United States media? Not so much.

Certainly North Dakota is experience record-breaking flooding:

Flooding in the Red River Valley is reaching levels never seen before.

So wrote Noreen Schwein, water program director at National Weather Service central region headquarters. Fargo’s mayor calls the flooding “uncharted territory.”

But you’ll have to look very hard to find a single story in the mainstream media that even mentions climate change (other than the few quoting our President) — even though the record “once-in-a-hundred-year flooding” the Midwest now seems to be getting every few years or so is precisely what scientists have been expecting from the warming [see "Global warming causes deluges and flooding, just like the Midwest is seeing (again)."]

In fact, in 2004, the Journal of Hydrometeorology published an analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center that found “Over the contiguous United States, precipitation, temperature, streamflow, and heavy and very heavy precipitation have increased during the twentieth century.” [And yes, this applies to snow, depending on the location, see below.]

They found (here) that over the course of the 20th century, the “Cold season (October through April),” saw a 16% increase in “heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 2 inches [when it comes as rain] in one day), and a 25% increase in “very heavy” precipitation events (roughly greater than 4 inches in one day)– and a 36% rise in “extreme” precipitation events (those in the 99.9% percentile — 1 in 1000 events). This rise in extreme precipitation is precisely what is predicted by global warming models in the scientific literature.

In fact, the last few decades have seen rising extreme precipitation over the United States in the historical record, according to NCDC’s Climate Extremes Index (CEI):

An increasing trend in the area experiencing much above-normal proportion of heavy daily precipitation is observed from about 1950 to the present.

Here is a plot of the percentage of this country (times two) with much greater than normal proportion of precipitation derived from extreme 1-day precipitation events (where extreme equals the highest tenth percentile of deluges, click to enlarge):

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