Can AI Help Solve the Climate Crisis?

Afew weeks ago, a short news story in <a href="https://www.theknowledge.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">The Knowledge</a> newsletter caught my eye: “Contrails, the thin white lines you sometimes see behind aeroplanes, account for around 35% of aviation’s global warming impact, according to the 2022 IPCC report. When Google teamed up with American Airlines to see if they could use AI to solve the problem, they found that with relatively minor changes to flight paths, they could reduce contrails by a whopping 54%.” If that were scaled up, continued the report, “which could be done for effectively zero cost, it would cut aviation’s global warming impact by almost 20%”. Could this be true? A chance to reduce the global warming impact of aviation by 20% overnight? Another thought crossed my mind. What else could AI do to help mitigate climate change? I have worked in AI for the last 4 years and have seen some of the amazing things it can do. At the same time, there is a huge amount of hype (and concern) with the technology. Three years ago, when I last considered climate applications of AI, tangible impact was thin on the ground. Now, however, the world of AI has been transformed. Whilst AI has been around for decades, it is only in the last 10 years or so that technological step changes have occurred, particularly around neural networks, that have exponentially increased the power of AI algorithms. In the last year alone, large language models that power generative AI such as ChatGPT, have pushed it to the forefront of public consciousness, with people using AI for an ever-increasing number of tasks. <a href="https://medium.com/the-new-climate/can-ai-help-solve-the-climate-crisis-1cba9e339b13">Click Here</a>