For the second year in a row, President Barack Obama has signed a federal disaster declaration for North Dakota due to record flooding of the Red River in a changing climate. “More than a third of the contiguous United States faces a high or above average flood risk this spring,” the National Weather Service reported yesterday. “We are looking at potentially historic flooding in some parts of the country this spring,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said. The Red River’s spring flood is coming three weeks earlier than average, after unprecedented warm weather “set records for both the earliest and longest spring melt in recorded history,” as a “10-day stretch of March never saw the mercury dip below freezing.” The 2009 flood set records for streamflow and river height. This year’s flood is coming more than a week earlier, having passed flood stage on Saturday:

STREAMFLOW: 11,600 cfs

FLOOD HEIGHT: 30.74 ft

This is the ninth “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. 2010 is the fourth 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 said last year:

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.

A 1995 document the North Dakota coal industry used before the legislature to show how carbon taxes would help wind and hinder lignite development.

In a bald attempt to defend coal industry profits, Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) has joined a predominantly Republican push to overrule the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding that greenhouse gases are dangerous pollutants. Earlier this month, Pomeroy introduced the Save Our Energy Jobs Act (H.R. 4396), which would rewrite the Clean Air Act so that “[t]he term ‘air pollutant’ shall not include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride.” Pomeroy’s justification for flouting the reality of the global warming threat is the need to defend the coal, oil, and gas industries:

This action could result in significantly raising local energy prices and endanger the 28,000 direct and indirect jobs that are connected to North Dakota’s coal industry, not to mention thousands of jobs connected to our manufacturing and expanding oil and gas industries.

Pomeroy’s claim that “regulations to address global climate change must only be enacted at the direction of Congress” is specious, considering that he voted against the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act, which did exactly that.

This is nothing new. North Dakota’s coal industry successfully blocked the state legislature from taking action on global warming pollution in 1995, by noting that it would make wind power more cost-effective than coal. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), while extolling North Dakota’s wind power potential, has decided to side with coal when it comes to actual climate policy decisions, though he has not taken the extreme step of embracing Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) resolution to overturn the greenhouse gas endangerment finding, as Democrats Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) have.

North Dakota’s allegiance to coal has delivered low-price electricity, but at great cost. North Dakota’s largest coal-fired power plant, the Great River Energy Coal Creek Station, is one of the nation’s most polluting plants, spewing over 800 pounds of mercury, 24,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, four million pounds of coal waste, and a staggering 10 million tons of carbon dioxide every year.

North Dakota’s climate is beginning to spiral out of control. 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′s unprecedented flooding made it the third year in a row with at least a “ten-year flood.” Pomeroy has two children — whose future he is putting at grave risk, all for the sake of donors like American Crystal Sugar ($99,025), whose facilities rely on coal plants, and the electric utilities who have given him $210,860.

Even though his state is still rebuilding from unprecedented floods, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) is committed to coal and wary of fighting climate change. Dorgan told the North Dakota Senate that he was concerned that the market created by capping global warming pollution could be open to manipulation:

I’m not very interested with having a bunch of folks with a bunch of money get their mitts on trading credits, and have our future and our destiny tied to their interests. I feel very strongly there’s something going on with our climate. We need to be attentive to it, we need to deal with it, but as we do, we have to be smart.

It’s legitimate to have a concern about the regulatory structure of a carbon market, about one-tenth the size of the fossil-fuel commodity markets, and Sen. Dorgan has the expertise to design the legislation. But he seems to be letting a policy detail obscure the real issue — that global warming pollution is completely unregulated, allowing corporate polluters to make astronomical profits while destroying the atmosphere.

This carbon loophole has allowed pollution giants like Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, Peabody Coal, and Massey Energy to ravage the planet, sicken our children, and rake in obscene profits for decades. Now, as North Dakota reels from its third extreme flood in as many years, scientists are warning that the climate crisis is outstripping their projections.

Yet Dorgan seems to be confusing political “reality” with actual reality, when he summarily dismissed Vice President Al Gore’s “Repower America” call that “the nation should rely solely on renewable fuels by 2020″:

Not going to happen. Not even close. We need to continue to use our most abundant resource, but to be able to do that, we have to be able to unlock the technology … to decarbonize coal, and we’re going to do that.

Again, Dorgan is missing the forest for the trees. Dorgan is strikingly pessimistic that America can free itself of fossil fuel dependence, even though the sun, wind, and human ingenuity are much more “abundant” resources than coal. Yet he willing to guarantee the success of experimental carbon capture and sequestration technology for coal-fired power plants Of course, a $300 million loan to a North Dakota coal plant for CCS development may help it along. If Dorgan truly wants CCS to happen, he should recognize that the most important thing the government can do is to create a market for clean energy by passing strong cap-and-trade legislation as soon as possible. Unfortunately, his voting record reveals he puts GOP filibusters of clean energy legislation above the security and health of the United States.

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.