As the flood waters receded, weary residents across the Northeast began pulling soggy furniture and ruined possessions onto their front lawns as they surveyed the damage wrought by Hurricane Irene.

The mess of destroyed furniture on Paul Postma’s front lawn looked like a yard sale gone wrong. Over the weekend, Postma had watched as more than two feet of rain filled the bottom level of his home in Lincoln Park, N.J. On Wednesday, he was using bleach to wipe down the house’s mud-soaked walls.

“None of this has value,” he said. “At least not anymore.”

Read it all.

Check it out and there is a good image there. If you have java, the moving water vaper loop picture is fascinating.

Check it out–ugh.

Anglicans are to meet in Nairobi next week to launch an appeal and advocacy campaign on the food crisis sweeping East Africa.

The meeting which will bring together primates and bishops from the worst hit areas, comes as the UN announced a deepening of the famine in southern Somalia.

The meeting is being organised jointly by the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa and the Anglican Alliance for development, relief and advocacy, through its Africa facilitator, Emmanuel Olatunji.

Read it all.

All too often the international community, or more specifically the former colonial powers, get blamed for interference, and for the destabilisation and disincentivisation of local initiative in these regions. And yet when children are dying, food and water need to be provided fast, it is often the international community which is best equipped for a rapid response. In Britain, we can be encouraged by the swift response from the Department for International Development, and it is my hope that governments of other nations respond as generously ”“ especially countries of the African Union. They cannot vicariously leave it to Kenya and Ethiopia.

But this is not the only response, and not, ultimately, what is needed to secure a better future for the region. In Eastern Kenya, the people living in the most desperate need are often those outside of the refugee camps. They see the refugees inside benefiting from World Food Programme handouts, while outside they struggle to feed themselves and keep their goats and cattle alive. Despite the horrors of life inside the camps, there is real security there – the promise of food, water, and some medical care. Capacity to provide such shelter should be encouraged but we should not forget there is a real need to ensure for those living on the edge, who year after year must eke out an existence in those dry and barren landscapes, are not forgotten. It is also crucial that people get the support locally so that they don’t have to make such perilous journeys to get aid.

Read it all.

Mark Shea points us here to see a letter to the editor which begins thus:

The lowest temperature this year was minus 22 in January, while on Tuesday, the high was 103 — a range of 125 degrees. We Minnesotans take that incredible diversity in stride like few other places in the world…..

Now consider–this is “the Letter of the Day” the paper says. What is he arguing for? Guess before you click–KSH.

Economists have found themselves repeatedly making excuses. First it was the snowstorms. Then it was Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster which crimped the supply of parts to car assembly plants in America. Then, as the snow melted, floods ravaged Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, and tornadoes battered Alabama and Missouri. America has suffered five incidents of extreme weather this year, each inflicting at least $1 billion in damage.

The most important special factor has been petrol. Prices jumped from $3 per gallon at the end of December to $3.90 in early May. That has siphoned off much of the purchasing power that consumers should have extracted from December’s tax agreement and subsequent gains in employment. Total consumer spending rose at just a 6.7% annual rate in the three months to the end of April, but most of that increase was eaten up by inflation. Real spending grew by a paltry 2.2%.

Read it all.

I happened to catch this yesterday morning courtesy of the BBC News and when I showed it to family members last night the agreement was it was something else. Watch it all–KSH.

Interstate 70, through central and eastern Missouri, was closed down for a while because of snow and ice. The closure stranded many motorists and workers along the highway. Host Michele Norris speaks to Terri Brackney and Greg Stratton, who work at the Travel Plaza Truck Stop in Warrenton, Mo., and have been stranded there since Monday.

Over 200 trucks parked overnight! Egads! Listen to it all–KSH (Hat tip: Elizabeth).

ABC News has reported: Premier Anna Bligh says Queensland is facing a reconstruction effort of post-war proportions as the state battles possibly the worst natural disaster in the country’s history.

The Brisbane River inundated more than 20,000 homes and businesses across the capital when it peaked this morning at 4.46 metres. More than 100,000 homes are without power across the city and to the west in Ipswich where floodwaters are receding rapidly after yesterday’s peak. The search for missing people continues in earnest across the Lockyer Valley, where this morning the body of a man was found in a field near Grantham, bringing to 13 the number confirmed dead.

Read it all and continue to pray for those in Australian struggling valiantly to shine Christ’s love in this challenging time.

Like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the Australian floods come as a salutary reminder that, for all the technological advances of our time and for all the sophistication of modern urban life, there are many ways in which our civilisation is vulnerable and some elements we are still powerless to control.

Read it all.

Ice and sleet and freezing rain-fun, fun, fun.

What a nice picture.

The Rev. Cathi Bencken managed to crack a joke Monday after an apparent lightning strike zapped an iron cross and crumbled the steeple of Trinity Episcopal Church.

“I don’t think it was (because) of anything I said,” she said of the sermon she delivered Sunday.

Neighbors in a nearby downtown apartment told Bencken and other church leaders that lightning hit the church about 3:30 a.m.

Read it all.

Mark Malsick jokes that his summer vacation plans are shot.

That’s because the severe weather liaison for the S.C. Climate Office doesn’t like how the hurricane season is shaping up.

And neither does anyone else.

El Nino has evaporated. That’s a warming trend in Pacific tropical waters which created high- altitude winds shearing hurricanes in this hemisphere the past few years. Meanwhile, the tropical Atlantic is warmer than it was in 2005, the record-breaking year with a record 27 named storms including the devastating hurricane Katrina. And hot seas make for mean storms.

Ugh–read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

As hurricane season looms, forecasters, scientists and residents along the Gulf Coast worry that a major storm could make the oil spill worse.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says a hurricane, or a succession of them, may bring oil up from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico and then push it ashore. Forecasters say a season with multiple storms could send oil farther inland and spread it as far as Cape Hatteras, N.C.

“To think a storm surge could resuscitate a huge sum of oil (from the deep) and deposit it on land is truly catastrophic,” says Joe Jaworski, mayor of Galveston, Texas, a city hit by Hurricane Ike in 2008.

Read it all.

There are a lot of fun pictures here.

As many as 50,000 Lowcountry residents are without power this morning as a result of the snow.

An estimated 12,500 people are without power in Charleston and 14,000 more in the Summerville area, according to SCE&G.

Berkeley County Electric Co-op is reporting another 20,000 outages, down from more than 32,000 at its peak early this morning.

The Highway Patrol is urging motorists to stay off the icy and slushy roads unless absolutely necessary.

We lost power and have lots of downed limbs. The yard is a winter wonderland. Wow. Read it all.

Update: The local newspaper photogallery is here and local residents sent in photos there.

Check it out.

Frigid Nights of the sort that we have been experiencing this week beg the question of whether Columbia’s homeless have proper shelter.

Fortunately, Columbia’s Winter Homeless Shelter, with a little more than 200 beds, is open. But while we suspect the shelter will function better than it ever has before, now that it is operated by The Cooperative Ministry and the USC School of Medicine, it alone isn’t enough to meet the needs of the city’s homeless. There are an estimated 900 homeless people in Richland County – and that estimate is quite likely low.

While the city and others make gallant efforts to ensure people at least have some place to go to keep warm, the fact is that simply trying to keep homeless people from freezing to death during winter months isn’t enough. The Oliver Gospel Mission, which focuses on turning around lives, does what it does well, but its reach is limited; the same can be said for other shelters, programs and advocates who work tirelessly to help the homeless. The bottom line is we aren’t doing enough.

Read the whole editorial from South Carolina’s largest newspaper.

Watch it all.

In the autumn time feels short, but that there is enough of it, which is paradoxical. Time being a tricky thing to think about is best done alongside Nature, where it seems to make more sense than it does by clock or by calendar. And the memory place that autumn is uses time itself as a container for the things that we keep returning to and trying to understand.

The reflective melancholy of autumn helps me to cope with change and loss, and to find both beauty and necessity in things passing. Ageing has a splendour to it.

Our culture cannot accept that. I think of those lines of Donne: “Nor spring or summer beauty hath such grace/ As I have seen in one autumnal face.”

Read it all.

In terms of numbers, the Anglican Church isn’t a very big player in Samoa.

But the scale of the tsunami disaster is such that no-one with any Pacific connections has been left untouched by it ”“ including some leading figures in the Diocese of Polynesia.

Take Taimalelagi Fagamalama Tuatagaloa-Leota, for example.

Archdeacon Tai, as she’s known to hundreds in this church is a Samoan living in Auckland. She has served as the Anglican Observer at the United Nations, on the Anglican Consultative Council, as a Diocese of Polynesia representative to the General Synod, and earlier this year she was priested.

For her, the impact of the tsunami is profound.

One of her adult sons was in a van that was swept out to sea by the tsunami. He finished up half under the van, impaled by roofing iron. He’s critically injured, and is in Apia hospital.

Read it all.

Quite something–watch it all.

I remember standing at Meeting and Broad streets, the famous Four Corners of Law, thinking this was a historic moment. As a reporter, I felt lucky to be there. As a citizen, however, it was devastating.

A few hours later, I waded onto the barrier islands and witnessed firsthand what looked like a war zone. The power of such a storm made houses on the island look like they had been inside a blender.

In the days to come, the sound of chain saws would dominate our senses as we all witnessed the aftermath of a nightmare.

I remember walking through the rubble of people’s homes and wondering how long it would take for us to recover from such a disaster.

Turns out, some of us never will.

Read it all.

An old city, like anyone who has lived a bold life, will have many scars. Over its lifetime, Charleston has weathered plagues, wars, fires, storms and earthquakes ”” events that left the city in ruins and terrified its residents.

Some scars from these traumatic times are still visible today; others healed outwardly but remain part of the city’s collective memory and are as real as the morning light.

Twenty years ago, Hurricane Hugo, a dark mass of spinning winds and vapor as big as the state itself, tore into South Carolina.

Those who went through the storm will never forget the rising waters, the freight-train wail of the winds, the Ben Sawyer Bridge tilting in the marsh, the pines snapped halfway up their trunks, the pink insulation everywhere, the convoys of people coming to help, the exhaustion at the end of a day trying to make things normal again.

Hard to believe it has been two decades. I remember a lot of things, but most of all the sound the wind made. It is a sound I never want to hear again. Read it all–KSH.

A devastating drought is sweeping across Kenya, killing livestock, crops and children. It is stirring up tensions in the ramshackle slums where the water taps have run dry, and spawning ethnic conflict in the hinterland as communities fight over the last remaining pieces of fertile grazing land.

The twin hearts of Kenya’s economy, agriculture and tourism, are especially imperiled. The fabled game animals that safari-goers fly thousands of miles to see are keeling over from hunger and the picturesque savanna is now littered with an unusually large number of sun-bleached bones.

Ethiopia. Sudan. Somalia. Maybe even Niger and Chad. These countries have become almost synonymous with drought and famine. But Kenya? This nation is one of the most developed in Africa, home to a typically robust economy, countless United Nations offices and thousands of aid workers.

The aid community here has been predicting a disaster for months, saying that the rains had failed once again and that this could be the worst drought in more than a decade. But the Kenyan government, paralyzed by infighting and political maneuvering, seemed to shrug off the warnings.

I caught this one coming home last night on the plane. Read it all and look at that remarkable picture.

Giant engineering schemes to reflect sunlight or suck carbon dioxide from the air could be the only way to save the Earth from runaway global warming, according to a group of leading scientists. But they say that these schemes could have their own catastrophic consequences, such as disrupting rainfall patterns, and should be deployed only as a last resort if attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fail.

The Royal Society, a fellowship of 1,400 of the world’s most eminent scientists, published a report yesterday on the feasibility and possible dangers of technologies for cooling down the Earth, known as geoengineering. The ideas include artificial trees that draw CO2 from the air and mimicking volcanoes by spraying sulphate particles a few miles above the Earth to deflect the Sun’s rays. The most far-fetched would would be to launch trillions of small mirrors into space to act as a sunshield.

A far cheaper solution would be a fleet of 1,500 ships that would suck up seawater and spray it out of tall funnels to create sun-reflecting clouds. However, the report said that these clouds could disrupt rainfall patterns and result in mass starvation in countries dependent on the monsoon.

Read it all.

(ACNS) ‘Continuing exaggerated weather patterns across Southern Africa are a further illustration of the urgent need to tackle global warming’ Archbishop Thabo Makgoba said on Tuesday, calling for swift and decisive global action on climate change.

Speaking in the week before the G20 summit, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town said ‘We have had enough of talking. The international community cannot continue to prevaricate while countries like ours are increasingly suffering inestimable human cost, in deaths, displacement, and the destruction of livelihoods. Northern Namibia is experiencing the worst flooding in decades, as is Southern Angola. This year has already seen serious storms, flooding and loss of life in Gauteng and Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa, as well as in Mozambique, where we are told we should expect further flooding, while other parts of the country suffer extensive drought.’

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Thousands of shivering, tired residents got out while they could and others prayed that miles of sandbagged levees would hold Friday as the surging Red River threatened to unleash the biggest flood North Dakota’s largest city has ever seen.

The agonizing decision to stay or go came as the final hours ticked down before an expected crest Saturday evening, when the ice-laden river could climb as high as 43 feet, nearly 3 feet higher than the record set 112 years ago.

“It’s to the point now where I think we’ve done everything we can,” said resident Dave Davis, whose neighborhood was filled with backhoes and tractors building an earthen levee. “The only thing now is divine intervention.”

Read it all.