AI’s effects on climate change: Both good and bad

Severe wildfires, raging storms and other extreme weather conditions are all indications that the climate is changing and not for the better.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its sixth report on the assessment of global climate conditions. The report looks at environments that are growing warmer, sea levels and species becoming extinct. The warning is clear: Something must be done to save the climate.

But some have attempted to use AI to combat climate change.

For example, Microsoft’s AI for Earth is meant to create AI projects that fight global climate change. Also, Nvidia has revealed plans to build a supercomputer that predicts climate change.

However, the use of AI technology to counter climate change is in some contradictory ways because of the technology’s tendency to consumer large amounts of energy.

In this Q&A, Neil Sahota, lead artificial intelligence advisor to the United Nations and CEO of AI vendor ACSILabs, discusses both how AI technology is helping to mitigate climate change, and the harmful effects of the technology. According to him, the key to using AI for climate change is innovative thinking.

How is AI technology helping to combat climate change?

Neil Sahota: There’s a lot of things you can do in terms of modeling, digital twins, using AI with generative design to try to figure out new [tools] to try and remove carbon from the atmosphere. From a tool process side, AI has been helpful.

On the flip side, all this comes with a cost. AI requires a lot of computing power, a lot of data, a lot of infrastructures, and all that does contribute to climate emissions.

These big powerhouse servers and supercomputers that we need to enable the AI ​​capabilities [involve] a lot of carbon that gets generated from the production. There is unfortunately some hazardous material waste in making some of these machines and then they have to be transported to the locations where these data centers are.

Now we’re building these gigantic buildings to house all these computers and power AI and cloud services.

How can we mitigate the negative effects of AI on the global environment?

Sahota: People are looking at more eco-friendly ways of producing computers to restrict some of the electrical consumption and emissions and the use of fans.

Our bigger challenge is that we are so used to how computers work, or how we think they work, that we are not thinking more disruptively. We are not asking ourselves: Is there a completely different way to manufacture a computer? Should we power computers without fans or anything like that?

AI requires a lot of computing power, a lot of data, a lot of infrastructures, and all that does contribute to climate emissions.