Global warming — with its implicit threat to human survival — is such an enormous challenge that many people who understand its causes feel there is little that an individual can do to try to reverse it.

Except for planting trees, that is.

Long before former Vice President Al Gore’s film focused public attention on the growing menace of greenhouse gasses, dedicated volunteers around the world were planting trees in campaigns to blunt a range of such environmental calamities as denuded forests, killer floods, droughts and climate change.

 With all the talk of real estate “settling down” and “correcting itself,” I began wondering if the era of Surreal Estate was over.

After all, foreclosure rates are up 68 percent since last year, careening appreciation has screeched to a halt and even the typically optimistic National Association of Realtors predicts that 2007 will see a flat market for existing homes and a declining market (down 9.4 percent) for new homes. In most parts of the country, home buyers are eschewing irrational exuberance for old-fashioned number crunching.

 Q: My mother died in 1988, and Dad passed away in 2006. The house was, and still is, in my late mother’s name alone. All dad did after mom’s passing was continue to pay the property taxes on the house. A couple of children are my dad’s from a prior marriage. What needs to be done to clear title to the house?

A.M.

San Antonio

A: What a mess. If your mother’s estate was never probated or distributed to her heirs, her will needs to be probated in the probate court where she was a resident at the time of her death. That proceeding will determine whether your father received title to the house or her will left it to somebody else.

 Q: My sister and her husband are about to sign a lease on a two-bedroom apartment. The lease requires them to have insurance for the contents of the residence.

I agree with the requirement, but my problem is with the landlord also requiring that they carry a minimum of $300,000 in public liability insurance coverage for bodily injury and property damage in and about the dwelling. The lease also requires that the landlord be named as an additional insured under that policy and provide the landlord with proof of such coverage. I don’t believe that it is the tenant’s responsibility to hold public liability insurance, especially in the ridiculous amount of $300,000. Please correct me if I’m wrong regarding this issue.

Two out of 3 Hispanic mortgage applicants are turned away because they can’t qualify under traditional criteria, according to a group of Latino housing professionals.The thousands of Hispanics who have achieved their ownership goals have done so largely because lenders have lowered their credit standards and raised their debt-to-income ratios, not because they qualify under normal guidelines, the group said.

But that may not be the healthiest solution for consumers or lenders, said Frances Martinez Myers, immediate past chairman of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.

Martinez said lenders must consider Latino cultural values “in order to continue to close the Hispanic home-ownership gap.”