In its sixth report, theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stressed that human influence in global warming is “unequivocal.”
Rising seas: among other things, it is virtually certain that the phenomenon will continue to grow in the 21st century. Making people care about these consequences, however, is another matter entirely: a team of Canadian and American researchers it's using artificial intelligence to show skeptics and "distracted people" the effects of the floods that we will see in the near future.
Rise of the seas: open your eyes and react
The work, the researchers explain, aims to combat inaction. “It has been discovered that visualizing the effects of climate change and especially rising seas helps overcome distancing. This is a psychological phenomenon that makes this danger perceived as temporally and spatially distant and uncertain. And therefore it does not react,” they wrote.
Images of extreme weather events and their impacts are particularly likely to trigger behavioral changes. Previous research has shown that simulating first-person perspectives on rising seas can help reduce distancing.
ClimateGAN shows us the scale of the problem
The researchers created a model called ClimateGAN (you know what are GANs, right?) which “exploits both simulated and real data to generate realistic images”. About what? Of the disaster that awaits us until we move to change direction. ClimateGAN first leverages a Masker model, which predicts what an image would look like underwater. Then, it uses a Painter model (itself using GauGAN, a deep learning model from Nvidia Research) to generate the appropriate water textures based on the input image and the masker model's prediction. I'll show you first: here.
To train the AI, the authors collected a total of 6740 images: 5540 non-flooded scenes to train the Masker model, and 1200 for the Painter model. They are now making this work available to other researchers to further refine these models.
Which currently have limitations, the researchers note.
A Google Street View showing the scourged world
What are these limitations? “An intuitive extension of our model would be to make flooding due to rising seas at any chosen height. We have problems doing this, because there is no dataset of street maps at different heights.”
The objective would be to show various effects for as many scenarios, so as to further understand the direct correlation between doing something against climate warming (and the consequent rising sea levels) and doing nothing. Hoping that it will serve to shock some people, even those who still deny the phenomenon despite the fact that we have been aware of it for 150 years.
The code for ClimateGAN, along with the simulated data, is available on GitHub.
