No, USA Today, Rising Seas Aren’t to Blame for ‘disappearance of rare cactus in Florida’

A recent article in USA TODAY claims that a rare cactus in the Florida Keys has gone extinct due to sea level rise. This is false. Many factors have contributed to the decline of this cactus and much of it began over 100 years ago. USA TODAY and many other news outlets are misleading their readers into believing climate change is at fault by not reporting the full set of facts.

The July 10, USA Today article, titled, A troubling first: Rising seas blamed for disappearance of rare cactus in Florida, says:

A rare tree cactus that grew for decades hidden by a tangle of mangrove trees on Florida’s Key Largo has lost its battle with rising sea levels and other pressures.

It’s now considered locally extinct in the United States, a group of researchers reported in a study published this week. The demise of the cactus is believed to be the nation’s first local extinction as a result of sea level rise, the study’s authors say.

Before getting into the science, let’s first examine it from a commonsense perspective. The photo used in the USA TODAY story shows the “extinct” cactus in standard plant nursery plastic pots (done by conservationists.) This strongly suggests that the cactus not only isn’t extinct but can be cultivated and replanted.

Ooops!

Perhaps these “journalists” are unclear on the definition of “extinction.” National Geographic has a helpful, simple definition:

So much for the claim of being extinct if the “rare cactus” is being grown in nursery pots. Perhaps the cactus should be renamed Bogus Maximus in honor of the claim.

Now, let’s examine the other claim – sea level rise as the cause of the fake extinction. The Florida Museum has this to say:

The Key Largo tree cactus (Pilosocereus millspaughii) still grows on a few scattered islands in the Caribbean, including northern Cuba and parts of the Bahamas. In the United States, it was restricted to a single population in the Florida Keys, first discovered in 1992 and monitored intermittently since.

Salt water intrusion from rising seas, soil depletion from hurricanes and high tides, and herbivory by mammals had put significant pressure on the population. By 2021, what had been a thriving stand of about 150 stems was reduced to six ailing fragments, which researchers salvaged for off-site cultivation to ensure their survival.

Note they correctly blame many factors for the disappearance in the Keys, but also note the cactus grows elsewhere. The press release for the study is even more telling:

Researchers at Fairchild began monitoring all of the tree cactus populations annually in 2007, working in tandem with local land managers. One Fairchild-led study showed that salt levels were higher in soil beneath dead vs. living cacti in the years following a storm surge event in the Lower Keys, drawing a clear connection between mortality and increased salinity.

…

The Key Largo tree cactus grew on a low limestone outcrop surrounded by mangroves near the shore. The site originally had a distinct layer of soil and organic matter that allowed the cactus and other plants to grow, but storm surge from hurricanes and exceptionally high tides eroded away this material until there wasn’t much left.

They go on to describe how a hurricane poisoned the soil the cacti grew in, “In 2017, category 5 Hurricane Irma swept across South Florida, creating a 5-foot storm surge. The highest point on Key Largo is only 15 feet above sea level, and large portions of the island remained flooded for days afterward.”

But here’s the most damaging fact they reveal, this “extinction” started a long time ago before sea-level was ever an issue:

Writing in 1917, botanist John Small noted that the Key tree cactus “was for a long time very abundant [on Key West]…In recent years, with the destruction of the hammock for securing firewood and for developing building sites, this interesting cactus has become scarce, until at present it is on the verge of extermination in its natural habitat.”

That’s right, the cactus was “on the verge of extermination” back in 1917, well before climate change became a cause célèbre for the media.

Worse, the study itself contains a lie of omission. Nowhere in the study being hyped by USA Today and other media outlets do they mention or reference this important study, Maul and Martin. 1993. Key West SLR Trends in Key West. Had the researchers bothered to look at this 1993 study examining Key West sea level records all the way back to 1846, they might have noticed this paragraph (highlight, author’s):

Perhaps the researchers considered this initially, and then discarded it as a reference, because it blows the entire premise of Key West sinking under sea level rise literally out of the water. Clearly the disappearance of this cactus has nothing to do with sea level rise but has been documented to be a result of a hurricane passage causing salt water to poison the soil the cacti were growing in along with habitat destruction noted as far back as 1917.

It seems this is just another case of the media ignoring research that undermines the climate change disaster narrative they want to push. It also seems that the researchers making the claim might have ignored some inconvenient data as well.

If the media did its job, it would have found the same thing we here at Climate Realism did. Sadly, the mainstream media seems patently unable or unwilling to do even a modicum of research by way of a fact check before they publish alarming, yet false, climate change claims.