With the death of cap and trade, significant climate change is now inevitable. Sooner or later, we will reach a tipping point, at which point climate change is not just a prediction, or a small effect that needs to be teased out by careful statistical analysis. Sooner or later, there will be a year where the cumulative effects of climate change will become undeniable. What would that year look like?

First of all, to be undeniable, we want it to be a year that "should" be cool according to other factors. Solar cycles add some variability to the Earth's temperature, so a year toward the end of a deep solar minimum would be good. El Niño is a natural phenomenon that tends to raise the temperature of the globe, so to be convincing it shouldn't be an El Niño year--ideally, it should be a La Niña year, when the Earth would be expected to be cooler. If the planet still experienced record warmth under those conditions, we'd know it was due to climate change, and not just a perfect storm of natural cycles.

While climate change will upset previous patterns, conceivably making some regions cooler, it will still be global in nature, with record heat occurring in more than a dozen countries across the world and record cold occurring nowhere. Unprecedented heat waves would kill thousands. Can you imagine a record temperature so hot that it breaks the thermometer?

The extreme heat would trigger drought and fire. Picture one of the world's great capitals shrouded in smoke from the country side for a week--that warning would be hard to miss, wouldn't it?

Heat triggers evaporation, and evaporation falls back to earth as rain and snow, so this year would likely also be the wettest on record, generating extreme floods. Imagine a "thousand-year flood" in a US city, submerging the central city. Entire countries would suffer from severe, unprecedented flooding, creating humanitarian catastrophes.

And then there are the inexorable changes--direct manifestations of climate. Island nations would be making plans for the day they need to leave their drowning homeland. Coral reefs would die en masse. And most dramatically, the familiar image of the Earth from space, with its white polar caps, would be forever changed, as the northern cap dwindles away in the summer.

Think this is alarmist? Evidence for this scenario below the jump.

SarahLawrence Scott :: What Climate Change Would Look Like

The evidence is simple: all of those things happened last year.

Climate change is no longer a prospect which can be avoided, it is now a fact of life.

And what will happen as we come out of the solar minimum? What will happen in an El Niño year? Last year, natural cycles conspired against warming, and we still had a horrific year. Expect some very rough years ahead, no matter what we do.

And we do need to do something. Things will only get worse as we continue to delay. It will not be the end of the world--Hollywood and the alarmists have perhaps done us a disservice by equating climate change with apocalyptic imagery, so that we do not recognize the real thing when it is staring us in the face. But Pakistan, and Moscow, and Nashville will not be isolated incidents, and the coral reefs and the ice cap will continue to disappear.