| | | Welcome. This week, the night-blooming cereus and a repairable kettle. Next week, I'll be back with a new story for my series about real estate and climate change: Do you know if you live in a resilient city? Write me with your questions at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails. |  | Learning Curve This year will almost certainly be the hottest on record. The world is expected to shatter the threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius of warming, according to data by the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service. The El Niño pattern from last winter is driving some of the record heat. The key player, however, is human-caused warming. "Whether we will be able, in the long run, to cool down the planet again and bring it once more below 1.5 depends on our current decisions and our priorities," Carlo Buontempo, the director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a statement. "Given our current commitment, it looks less and less likely we will be able to see the global temperature drop below 1.5 degrees again before the end of the century." |  |  | Snapshot When Hurricane Helene barreled through North Carolina this September, millions of trees were lost in the dense Appalachian forests hundreds of miles from the coast. North Carolina rarely experiences the fury of tropical storms. So Helene's torrential rains and winds in excess of 100 mph were devastating. Roughly one-fifth of the region's million-acre federally protected forests suffered catastrophic damage, according to the North Carolina Forest Service. | | Drone footage shows trees leveled by Hurricane Helene near Janice Barnes and Leo Temko's property in Buncombe County, North Carolina. | | The damage, extending for more than 200 miles through the southern Appalachians, portends long-term consequences to wildlife habitat, invasive species, elevated wildfire risk and tourism. "We're being tested now like never before," said Paul Curtin, Appalachian Trail supervisor for the Carolina Mountain Club. Read more here. |  |  | | Ross Zimmerman lives in the county's most biodiverse desert: Arizona's Sonoran Desert. The entomologist sent in this video of the nighttime activities of moths in his own backyard after my recent column on why you just might fall in love with the cuddly insects. "Here's a sphinx moth pollinating an Arizona night-blooming cereus," he wrote. "The moths have to find multiple plants for the pollen to be shared and seeds set." All cereus cacti's individual flowers open for one night, and they need pollinators for fertilization. You can see the whole video here. Send me your photos and stories at climatecoach@washpost.com | | Arizona night-blooming cereus (Peniocereus greggii). | | Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Climate Coach in your inbox every Tuesday. See you next Tuesday, Michael Coren, Climate Coach | | |
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