The Government Just Listed a Lizard as Endangered and Named the Cause: 75% of Its Habitat Is Projected Underwater by 2040.

The number is 205.

That is how many Florida Keys mole skinks have been documented, in total, since the year 2000, across the fifteen islands where the species has recently been found. A hundred and forty-four of them - about 70 percent - were on one island, Big Pine Key [1].

On July 21 the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed the subspecies as endangered, effective August 20 [1] [2].

What makes the rule worth reading is not the listing. It is the threat section, which is a sea level projection.

Florida's sea level rise is put at approximately 41 to 46 cm by 2050, against roughly 24 cm globally [1]. Florida is running nearly twice the global figure.

At Key West the measured rise was about 0.25 cm a year from 2000 to 2023. Coastal flood days there went from about 5 a year in 1965-1974 to about 25-30 a year in 2005-2014, with minor flooding projected at 7 to 15 days a year by 2030 and 25 to 75 by 2050 [1].

The islands the skink lives on average under four feet of elevation [1].

Put those together and you get the finding: up to 75 percent of its habitat is projected to be lost by 2040. Under the lowest sea level scenario the Service modelled, nine of the fifteen current populations lose 50 to 90 percent of their habitat and two are wiped out entirely [1].

The Service's conclusion is that the subspecies 'is in danger of extinction throughout all of its range' [1].

There is something worth naming about what an endangered listing can and cannot do here.

It prohibits take - harassing, harming, capturing, killing - and obliges federal agencies to consult before acting in ways that might jeopardise the species [1]. Those are real protections against a bulldozer.

They are not protections against water.

The rule grants the strongest status the Endangered Species Act has, for a species whose principal threat the same document says will remove three-quarters of its habitat within fourteen years.

This is not an argument about climate policy. It is a note about where the argument has already been settled in writing - in the threat analysis of a binding federal rule, published by a federal agency, taking effect August 20.