Essay by Eric Worrall

Imagine a world run by ChatGPT

FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Post breakthrough: How AI can lift climate research out of the lab and into the real world

May 29, 2024

• Technological innovation is needed if the world is to avert the most dangerous climate change scenarios.
• Innovation begins with research and development (R&D) but does not end there. AI can catalyze innovation by translating R&D into climate action.
• Generative AI’s capabilities for natural language processing, data synthesis and down-scaling and product prototyping can deliver practical tools to climate leaders.

The world is making big bets on technology’s role in the climate crisis. Across the globe, scientists and technologists are pushing for the next wave of breakthroughs in climate adaptation and mitigation. And there is reason for optimism: recent years have seen meaningful progress, from weather forecasting to industrial decarbonization.

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AI and climate change

The debut of Generative AI (GenAI) expanded the collective imagination of what AI can do. We already know that AI can drive scientific breakthroughsbut can it go further? Leaders should explore how AI can act as a downstream catalyst in the innovation cycle, driving adoption of the latest tools and awareness of the latest science. Here are three places to start:

1. Organizing unstructured Earth data and down-scaling models to local levels

Earth science has been seen as “data messy” due to complex Earth systems and unstructured environmental data from observational methods. Recently, the volume of such data has exploded, with over 100 terabytes of satellite imagery collected daily. Yet, this doesn’t simplify the data’s unstructured nature. AI is key to organizing and down-scaling this vast data for local applications.

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2. Building a ‘GPT’ interface to translate climate models into simple language 

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GenAI could simplify this by providing a GPT-like interface enabling users of all backgrounds to interact with climate data relevant to their needs, such as monitoring local sea-level changes. This approach could make climate models more accessible and build trust in climate projections.

3. Accelerating the prototyping phase of technology development

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Leaders must, therefore, step up to build ecosystems for AI and climate change. The World Economic Forum’s Tech for Climate Adaptation Initiativehelps enable this necessary environment by convening players from big technology, startups, academia, government and other stakeholders.

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Read more: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/05/ai-lift-climate-research-out-lab-and-real-world/

Maybe I’m being too harsh about this latest WEF brainstorm.

Generative AI has a known tendency to lie and make things up (technically known as “hallucinations” in the AI industry), but Google recommends one way to combat hallucinations is to limit the range of possible responses.

There is an obvious output limitation would protect the reputation of the proposed climate chatbot.

If climate ChatGPT had a limitation of only discussing climate disasters which would occur at least 50 years in the future, and ignoring or deflecting dangerous questions like “where are today’s climate disasters?”, there would be no chance the climate chatbot’s “hallucinations” would ever be discovered. 50 years from now, who would remember what a chatbot said today?

From CFACT

By Peter Murphy

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

God keep our land glorious and free!

• From the national anthem of Canada

Oh, Canada. You’re in trouble.

And America is not far behind its northern neighbor in losing its freedom and becoming an effective dictatorship.

Climate change policies are the root cause of the transformation from a mostly free society to a less free, more tyrannical nation. The Canadian government, led by long-time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is climate fanatical and increasingly directing its citizens’ behavior in disturbing, ominous ways.

“There is no vaccine against a polluted planet,” said the prime minister back in late 2020 when he proposed raising the nation’s carbon tax. He also regularly refers to the “climate crisis” to explain his actions.

When the planet itself supposedly hangs in the balance, you can rationalize almost anything, no matter how silly, unscientific, or oppressive, starting with Mr. Trudeau’s false conflating of carbon with pollution, which is typical of the climate obsessives in America, too. The former is essential to life itself and inherent in Earth’s atmosphere, while the latter is a nuisance that has largely been solved as a practical matter in the U.S.

Carbon emissions from manmade sources are about 1/10,000^th of the Earth’s atmosphere, and their increase has had no palpable or corresponding effect on global temperature. Yet that scientific fact and historical reality get lost in the pursuit of governmental power and societal control well underway in Canada and the U.S.

As for pollution from particulate matter, it still remains but is nowhere near commonplace in the U.S. as it was in the 1970s when the recently formed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was implementing the Clear Air and Clean Water Acts and other landmark laws enacted by Congress. With carbon labeled as “pollution,” the EPA found a new purpose and expanded its bureaucracy and power.

But, back to our northern neighbor.

Canada imposes a carbon tax, bans coal power plants, subsidizes electric vehicles, and heavily regulates methane gas emissions in the oil and gas industry. The Trudeau government has been embarking on a plan to achieve “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2050, meaning carbon released into the atmosphere would be fully absorbed by planting trees, installing carbon capture storage facilities, and other measures, including blocking Canada’s provinces from extracting abundant energy from its tar sands.

One step Prime Minister Trudeau announced earlier this year at the “Democracy Summit” in South Korea was to pledge more than $8 million to commission a study on the supposed connection between “democratic decline” and climate change. Specifically, the money will be used to support climate change policy advocates in other countries, to reclaim “civic space to confront the climate emergency [and] support human rights defenders working on climate and industrial issues across the global south,” the prime minister’s statement read.

In reality, climate policies are steadily eroding “human rights” in Canada and the U.S. because they are increasingly restricting what kind of car you can drive, where you can live (or what can be built next to you), what you can soon eat and not eat, and how and where you can travel. Ideas that may seem outlandish now are the canaries in the coal mine, such as forcing high-rise, low-income apartments in suburban communities, banning fertilizer, or eliminating gas-power cars – all in the name of saving the planet from “climate pollution.

We should not doubt this worrisome, restrictive direction since wannabe dictators like Justin Trudeau and President Joe Biden constantly give us not-subtle hints.

In early 2022, Canadian truckers organized a large, days-long protest in Ottawa that was ruthlessly broken up by Mr. Trudeau’s invoking the nation’s Emergencies Act to impose Marshall Law. This included blocking electronic donations to support the truckers and seizing protesters’ bank accounts. (CFACT supported the protests and raised funds for the truckers.)

Shortly following these protests, Mr. Trudeau was applauded by many in the European Parliament for warning against “threats to democracy”, yet his hypocrisy was too much some members, who condemned him for wielding his “quasi-liberal boot” against the protestors trying to protect their rights.

Now comes an effort by Trudeau to incarcerate his nation’s citizens who speak things he opposes with his Online Harms Act, which would effectively censor speech and includes empowering the police and courts to use Internet speech to impose fines and incarcerate those whom the state views as objectionable or threatening.

In the U.S., censorship directed by the Biden administration has been all too real, even though we are governed ostensibly by the Constitution’s First Amendment right to free speech.

“Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction,” said the 40^th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. “It must be fought for [and] protected.”

As the Trudeau government in Canada and the Biden administration here in the U.S. press on with climate policies that reach into every crevice of society, censor speech, and show a willingness to seize the bank accounts and incarcerate those who resist, freedom’s erosion in both countries is coming very rapidly indeed.