Researchers Use AI To Show The Impact Of Climate Change And Rising Sea Level

Climate change is impacting different parts of the world. Global warming causes the sea level to rise, leading to many islands might be submerged underwater soon.

But if you live nowhere near the coastlines, you won’t understand how severe the situation is. However, this AI tool might help you with that.

Researchers from Mila Quebc Artifical Intelligence Institute have developed an AI platform capable of showing people how climate change affects their surrounding areas.

Victor Schmidt who is a Ph.D. at Mila and also the paper’s lead author stated that it is difficult for people to understand the severity of climate change when they only read about polar bears and remote areas. However, climate change comes with so many consequences. And everyone is going to be impacted. Schmidt and his team want people to better understand the situation and take action.

With the platform, people can see what the future looks like if they keep on disregard our planet. Users can input street addresses and then see how things will become if a natural disaster happens.

The picture can be a street flooded with water. The water level will depend on if they live close or far from the shore. At the moment, flooding is what the platform is focusing on. However, more difficult scenarios such as wildfires will be added later.

An image-to-image translation algorithm is being used to turn images from Google Street View into pictures of the post-apocalyptic world that we might suffer if we don’t prevent climate change from happening. To make their system more intelligent, the researchers are making use of GAN (generative adversarial network).

Schmidt then added that showing people how badly climate change would affect their surrounding areas was a good way to make climate change less distant and more personal.