Edward Lotterman

Late-night TV comedian Taylor Tomlinson describes telling a boyfriend that she is “the lesson that you just cannot learn!”

That Catch-22 applies to what a changing climate is to the people of our nation, and world. We need to get slapped upside the head again and again until, finally, we learn. Until we don’t. So we get used to the slapping.

We are still in a learning experience right now. Weather this year is like a ‘50s DJ’s playlist: The hits just keep on coming! As this is written, wildfires fostered by heat waves threaten the Phoenix area. In the Upper Midwest, multiple rivers remain over flood stage with some receding but others rising — and rain in the forecast. Various heat domes have covered much of the nation.

And up next: Models predict an active hurricane season.

On the weekend of June 23, tornado warnings were issued for an unprecedented broad area of the Northeast, including all of Vermont and New Hampshire, along with significant portions of several other states.

Our country is not alone. Floods in China exceed normal seasonal ones and involve some 300 million people. A month ago, the temperate-zone states of Brazil adjoining Uruguay had destructive floods well above previous records. Early tropical storms in the Caribbean brought damaging wind and rains to coastal Mexico.

Here in Minnesota, rainstorms and flooding dominate the news.

The Mississippi is rolling past downtown St. Paul at 114,000 cubic feet per second. Since 1893, it has passed that level only seven times, and six of those were in April, during rapid spring thawing of large snowpacks. But we didn’t have much snow this year — remember that? This time, it’s rain. With the water flowing in from the Minnesota River, a new summer record for the Mississippi may be set by Sunday.

A week ago, flooding closed unprecedented numbers of highways across Minnesota, including I-90 and state highways in and out of county seats like Worthington, Luverne, Pipestone and Slayton. As the water flowed down the Rock River and into the Big Sioux River dividing Iowa and South Dakota, I-29 was shut, as were many state and country other roads. Further east and north, Waterville in Le Sueur County is threatened by the two lakes it bestrides nearly merging into one. And our DNR’s Cooperative Stream Gaging program shows “Much Above Normal” flows at multiple points around the perimeter of the state.

Most people don’t appreciate the enormity of this.

Last Sunday, June 23, the U.S. Geological Survey stream gauge in Rock Valley, Iowa, recorded a flow of 151,000 cubic feet per second before washing out. That was five times that hour’s flow of the Mississippi at Highway 610 and 2.5 times that at downtown St. Paul. This was all in a stream only fed by two Minnesota and two Iowa counties, one with median flows under 1,000 cfs in summer months. Only once has the volume past St Paul been higher than that. Even accepting that volumes recorded at extreme levels are more estimates than measurements, the more accurately measured height of water blew through all records.

Now rivers are retreating in the area where the states of Minnesota, Iowa and South Dakota meet. Yet many fields are still flooded, some with crops totally destroyed. Basements are still being pumped, uninhabitable houses tagged and road infrastructure getting hasty temporary repairs. The collapse of an old, obsolete but heavily used railroad bridge near Sioux City, Iowa, will tangle traffic on BNSF and other rail lines in Minnesota for months, including the ones paralleling Highways 23 and 60.

The partial wash-out of the Rapidan Dam on the Blue Earth River brought us national attention. The old dam had long-known structural problems. Logs and other debris clogging its spillway gates was the proximate cause of its overtopping. But before its gage washed out on Wednesday, river flows hit 34,700 cfs. The only volume above that in more than a century of data was the spring 1965 snowmelt that set records across the Upper Midwest. Any summer flows that even approach this week were relatively recent, 2010, 2018 and 1993. Prior to that, the record summer flow was in 1953 at half of this week’s levels but equaled by that in May 2023.

Yet we are bitterly divided on the causes. Twenty years ago, concerns about climate change were voiced by politicians in both parties, though more commonly by Democrats than Republicans. For years, Big Oil, Big Auto and Big Energy tried to play down the “man-made” influence, and politicians in their pockets played along. The economic incentives here should be obvious.

But going forward, what are the economic issues? The starting point is that the population of our nation is coming to accept that the climate is changing, and we are adapting. Many people now realize that adjustments will be forced on households and businesses going forward. These adjustments will have many spillover effects — from insurance rates and property values, migration patterns and the availability of fresh water and food, to name a few.

True, cross-political concern still exists in the general public. In late 2023, the most recent “Climate Change in the American Mind” surveys conducted by a team at Yale University, found that half of all Republican voters were “cautious, concerned or alarmed.” But in elections and in debates and votes in Congress, the position that climate change is a hoax dominates GOP actions. These divisions reflect other ways in which deep-party politics have become much more deeply divided than voters themselves.

This may merit a column of its own. Meanwhile, the immediate challenges we face are serious and diverse, and could require serious investment of time and resources.

How much effort will we put into fighting the effects of a changing climate by building levees and seawalls, further tapping aquifers or transporting water across the country? Will we subsidize rebuilding towns like Rock Valley, Iowa, situated in flood plains that are likely to be inundated again? Will we forbid it? Will we subsidize home and business place relocation? Subsidize investment in alternative energy forms? What fraction of incentives for change will come from government mandates, carrots or sticks? How much from private market pressures such as property insurance rates or property values themselves?

In an ideal world, where political parties could work toward some degree of consensus and compromise on measures to take, we might have coherent sets of measures at federal, state and local levels. With current bitter politics that is not realistic in the foreseeable future.

So we will muddle through. Political power is not shared equally across all income categories. People owning beach- or canal-front properties in the Carolinas and Florida have clout. So do many people whose lakefront house now is a mudflat-front house. So we inevitably will spend some public resources protecting what cannot be protected and restoring what should not be restored.

For lessons from parallels, we might think back a century. The 1927 flooding in the lower Mississippi was the worst natural disaster in the history of our country. Passive GOP President Calvin Coolidge did nothing, but his energetic Commerce Secretary, engineer Herbert Hoover, initiated vast relief efforts, ensuring his position on the GOP ticket in 1928. Frozen by the economic crisis that unfolded months after his inauguration, Hoover froze for four years and Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was swept into office in 1932. Roosevelt’s New Deal included building a vast array of dams for electric power, flood control and transportation plus other infrastructure. Much of this was useful, part kicked problems a few decades down the road.

Now the forces of nature have grown too large and too global. No new New Deal can build ourselves out of a changing climate. Yet leadership can make a difference. Hoover was the best commerce secretary we ever had; FDR the president who most shaped what our economy and society look like today. No one like that is on the horizon, but if we all could come closer to agreement on the challenges we face there could be more hope.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

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For current and historic stream data, search: “USGS river flow data” and follow links. For help, write to stpaul@edlotterman.com.