Armed with artificial intelligence, scientists take on climate change

Researchers are using AI to tackle the flood of data needed to understand and respond to the effects of climate change.

[OCS: Man can adapt to varying local weather conditions, but not so much global climate changes on a geological timescale. At this point in time, all we can say is the climate appears to be changing as it has done since the Earth developed oceans and an atmosphere. How it is changing and why it changes is still in the realm of theories which need to be validated or falsified – with the end result being “we do not know that which we do not know” and more research is required.]

Science needs to understand and predict how climate change—and the growing onslaught of hurricanes, fires, and floods it’s bringing—affects tropical forests. Will the forests respond to the assault with shorter trees? Will they store less carbon, or support less tree and plant diversity and fewer wildlife species?

[OCS: Perhaps researchers should spend more time on the effects of natural oscillations which give rise to storms and extreme weather? Especially the effects of El Niño/La Niña (Southern Oscillation) which have been shown to affect global changes in temperature,  rainfall, and the severity of storms.

As for wildfires, they are a natural process where forests are renewed and overgrowth managed by a natural feedback cycle. As for wildfires in the Western United States, they have been potentiated by wrong-headed environmentalist policies and any increase in damages can be laid at the feet of political corruption in zoning and building codes.]

To better understand the effects a changing climate will have on tropical forests, Maria Uriarte, Columbia University professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology, needs to analyze images of forests. These bird's-eye view images are the size of a postage stamp. And she’s working with enough postage stamp-size images to cover a 28,000-acre national park. Since it would take her years to analyze even a dozen of those images, there’s no way she could handle enough to get a real understanding of an entire forest.

[OCS: Perhaps she will be able to compute an answer to those unable to see the forest for the trees. I wonder if she is going to collaborate with ecologist Dr. Thomas Crowther who specializes in ecology and is the chief scientific advisor to the UN's Trillion Tree Campaign. More specifically, Crowther’s work in tree mapping research to determine the  diversity and distribution of forest trees across the world for the first time which attempted to quantify the scale of human impact over time.]

Finding the needle in the haystack

Researchers are throwing their weight into better understanding the changing climate and finding ways to stall or even reverse it because of the speed at which the climate is changing and its effects on everything from rising sea levels to agriculture, wildlife, storm patterns, shrinking ice sheets, droughts, and human populations.

[OCS: Funny how those who seek funding always fall back on the dodge of looking at the rate of change rather than the gross change itself – which is almost insignificant when you find that the Earth has been hotter, colder, with more atmospheric carbon dioxide and less carbon dioxide, in the past and we are still here. That our forefathers experienced powerful storms and did not label them as the effects of global warming. Cold periods were called winter and warm periods were called summer. People adapted lived in arctic conditions and in deserts by choice. According to the experts, you would have thought that these people would have been smart enough to migrate to less hostile conditions.

Scientist/Activists, or those who must pursue “fashionable science” to obtain funding, seem to take delight in overlooking the fact that there is not a single method to directly identify, isolate, and measure man’s climate signal amid the noise of nature’s normal variability.]

And with such a massive undertaking, scientists need the most powerful tools they can get their hands on. Massive databases, data analysis tools, and high-performance computing are all being used. But AI, often feared as a threat to humanity, is turning out to be one of the most powerful tools scientists are using to protect the planet.

[OCS: Artificial intelligence (as if that really exists) as a method for interpreting patterns is as fraught with danger as those who “see” pictures in random events such as clouds (or with drug-induced hallucinations). Pattern-matching by imperfect brains can result in extreme danger when mapped into public policies. Just because a curve is trending upward, it does not always signify a planetary emergency that requires draconian public policies and the implementation of foreign ideologies.]

Making climate predictions that span decades

AI is proving to be a key tool for scientists working on climate change predictions, notes Dr. Eng Lim Goh, vice president and chief technology officer for high-performance computing and AI at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Unlike weather forecasting, which is more local and has a day-to-day time frame, climate modeling makes global predictions spanning decades and uses enormous amounts of corresponding data. With so much data and a myriad of factors to consider, it’s often difficult for us to ensure that all relevant causes are included. AI, according to Goh, can be a valuable tool to augment humans in taking care of this.

[OCS: Thinking in terms of decades is short-sighted because global climate change cycles are hundreds or thousands of years long. And, the shorter the timeframe, the more chaotic the climate system appears, making credible and reliable predictions unlikely.]

“The accuracy of traditional top-down rules-based or laws-based approaches is only as good as the scientists having accounted for all factors that contribute to the prediction,” Goh says. “This is not a simple endeavor. For example, after accounting for heat absorbed by our oceans, scientists also have to remember to account for heat reflected by our ice sheets. After accounting for emissions caused by human activity, they need to remember to include livestock emissions, and so on.”

[OCS: All of the influences of human activity are relatively insignificant when measured against the real drivers of climate change (the Sun's energy output in all spectral bands, the production of extraterrestrial cosmic rays, the Earth's position relative to the Sun, the Earth's precessional and rotational dynamics, the Earth's vulcanology and plate tectonics, the heat transfer and behavior of deep ocean currents, and the most significant greenhouse gas influence, water vapor (clouds).

And that the significant drivers of climate are ignored in favor of nonsensical public policies that are meaningless in the scheme to change global climate. What they really change is human behavior in the pursuit of a political ideology.]

Informing critical climate decisions, policy

Lloyd A. Treinish, a distinguished engineer and chief scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, says AI will be increasingly used in climate change research and in helping people make critical decisions.

“Ultimately, these are tools that can help people who are on the policy or business side understand the implications of the choices they are making,” says Treinish, who has worked with city officials and utility companies on long-term sustainability issues. “[AI’s] biggest potential role right now is in the decision-making aspects, trying to assess the implications of a changing climate and understand how choices affect it. It’s going to be a matter of policy to make the changes needed to reduce the effects of a changing climate.… We’d use AI to help them make decisions.”

[OCS: Funny, those decisions appear to be biased towards a single political ideology and public policy descriptives which reduce man’s freedom, liberty, and choices in favor of  centrally-planned progressive policies that have little or nothing to do with climate, such as wealth redistribution and the equality of misery as the progressives reduce everything to the lowest common denominator.

You do not need fancy AI tools to tell you when your inalienable rights are being violated or when the entire capitalist system, which is responsible for the major gains in society, is under assault by those who want to impose their brand of authoritarian socialism.]