A new site called "This Climate Does Not Exist" uses AI to show s how their house, neighborhood, or any place in the world, would look when extreme climate change sets in. The site was released just days before the UN COP26 Climate Change Summit kicks off in Glasgow UK. AI and machine learning are increasingly being used by climate change scientists and climate activists for their visualization and big data processing potential.
Climate change drives a wide range of consequences and impacts. Some impacts are direct and evident like flooding, drought, air pollution, and wildfires. Other impacts are indirect and hidden like food shortages, health-related epidemics and pandemics, and poverty. Climate change does not affect developed countries in the same way as it affects low-income countries. For many who do not live with climate impacts, it is hard to imagine what life would be if hit by an extreme event.
scary climate change information, s get a very realistic image.
Seeing Is Believing
The project was developed by a group of scientists from Mila’s AI for Humanity. They acknowledge that they are not climate scientists but computer experts using machine learning to create empathy for the climate crisis. The project is based on research that suggests that showing the impacts of climate change create empathy, especially if the places are familiar to the viewer.
The AI project premise was simpler than its execution. It took the team long months to train the GAN to generate images that were indistinguishable from the real images. “This is called convergence and it is challenging to achieve since images have many characteristics and attributes," they explained. Complex coding of mathematical functions was included to get the realistic feel just right.
While the visualization tools have some limitations — it does not work like a Google map where one can zoom in and zoom out and the result is not a high-definition image — the algorithm is very realistic. Making climate change impacts personal is effective, some say if no action is taken we will soon not need AI to bring floods to our doorstep, all we will have to do is open the front door and see it ourselves.
Source: This Climate Does Not Exist