Your section on saguaro and other cacti of the Sonoran desert is misleading and inaccurate.

We actually had a pretty good rainy season this past year, it was just early.

Heat stress on bats, bees, and doves which pollinate saguaro is of greater concern than nightime temperatures not dropping below 85° during the dog days of summer, which is usual. It's not unusual to not get below 90°F during August, actually, in the Phoenix area. That was true 30 years ago too.

What you have to remember is that many of these reported temps are from cities like Phoenix and Tucson. Cities are heat geysers. All the concrete retains the heat collected during the day. We have saguaro within the city, under more heat stress than the general desert due to that geyser effect. For the most part, they seem fine. I've seen maybe 5 collapses this year. 3 were very young, just planted and planted without a nurse tree. Saguaro need a nurse tree or some other shade source in their early years. Somebody bought these from a nursery and just put them out in a yard as a landscaping choice. They collapsed because they weren't protected. One didn't get any water at all as near as I can tell. New owners.

Two were older. One is at an Elementary school and it was collapsing before last summer. Collapses are generally pretty slow processes, btw, it's not like the cactus just "faint" and fall out. Anyway, this one, it was probably planted when this school was built about 30ish years ago. Still young, but established. Not sure what's going on with it, but it's been struggling for s while. It's clear the heat this summer has exacerbated the collapse. It's definitely collapsing faster now.

The last one is in one of those planted divides in the middle of the road on MetroCenter Parkway up by the transit center. About 5 years ago, some fool was driving drunk and hit it. That one is also well established and been around a good long while. It's about 20 ft tall or more and has multiple branches. It looked like it was going to recover from that damage, which is visible, but the heat wave might have been too much. It's been tilting the last 2 months or so and the brown, dying back areas are spreading up the column. I doubt it's going to make it, but again, it's still standing, still mostly green, it will probably flower this spring, and it might recover yet.

I'd worry about the bats, the mustangs, the coyotes, the bees, the homeless the red states keep abandoning here, and the snowbirds who can't make it without air conditioning before I worried about the saguaro.

A lot of prickly pear, on the other hand, really did just fall out. They're still wilted, yellowed, and pathetic looking all over the city. They had a spectacular flowering last spring too. Just gorgeous. Hardly any fruit come late summer/early fall though. See what I mean about worrying about those bees? Didn't see many this year.