GW update: Degassing has started.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Maybe I'm hopelessly optimistic, but I don't think it will be that bad... I expect other opportunistic species to survive, so in addition to algae we'll have ratburgers, too.

In all honestly, only the hyperspecialists will die. More generalist species and species with larger native ranges will flourish. Bullfrogs are not going anywhere... neither are most pythons or natricine snakes

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Maybe I'm hopelessly optimistic, but I don't think it will be that bad... I expect other opportunistic species to survive, so in addition to algae we'll have ratburgers, too.

Well, of course. In fact, the overall biomass of the planet probably won't fall that much--90% of the species on the planet will go extinct, but the survivors will be the generalists with the largest populations.

Anyway, Valdemar is, in truth, just trying to warn us that our current mode of living is going to come to an end. We could concentrate sunlight (or use a couple nuclear reactors to generate artificial sunlight) on an algae tank built out of the concrete hulk of the Metrodome and produce enough kcals of food-energy in it to feed the whole of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Let's make it clear that the current carrying capacity of the Earth in humans, if the entire planet was converted into a giant algae hydroponics facility, is like 130 billions (or possibly substantially more than that--I'd need to look up the original source). So we can lose 99% of the carrying capacity of the planet and still support 1.3 billion on processed algae. Algae really is a marvelous stuff, and you should be thankful that it exists. If we want meat, our society may even be luxurious enough to have vast fish farms in our cities, which can easily be built to withstand even the largest hurricane possible--10,000psi + was easily achieved for hardened ICBM silos, after all, and no hurricane or mega-tornado can even get close to that, and we can just go underground, anyway.

Life won't even necessarily be that bad. Energy needs for our society will be met, and ample energy in excess will be available, by the ubiquituitous fast-breeding thorium cycle reactors which will power our future civilization, and everyone will live in urban areas twice again as dense as modern-day Macao or Hong Kong, where all energy production can be centralized and all processing centralized as well, so we'll have plenty of spare power for people to lose themselves in VR and other future MMORPGs. Even, after all, with the situation currently this bad, we probably have about 200 - 300 years to complete these Arcologies in, even in the absolute worst-case scenario.

[The Yosemite Bear]

somehow I thought that said "De-Gaussing" had began. yeah we are going to lose our precious computers, and other things based on electromagnitism....

Yeah, I screwed up the terminology. Degassing is when gas comes out from a liquid. Thread title should be "Outgassing", which is when it comes from rocks.

and "De-Gaussing" is royally screwing up the electromagnetic forces.