Researchers are developing artificial intelligence that could expose climate change tipping points. The deep learning algorithm could function as an early warning system against runaway climate change.
Professor Chris Bauch at the University of Waterloo looked at thresholds beyond which rapid or irreversible change happens in a system. Bauch said,”We found that the new algorithm was able to not only predict the tipping points more accurately than existing approaches but also provide information about what type of state lies beyond the tipping point.”
Some tipping points that are often associated with run-away climate change include melting Arctic permafrost, which could release significant amounts of methane and spur further rapid heating; breakdown of oceanic current systems, which could lead to almost immediate changes in weather patterns; or ice sheet disintegration, which could lead to rapid sea-level change.
The innovative approach with this AI is that it was programmed to learn not just about one type of tipping point but the characteristics of tipping points generally.
The approach gets its strength from hybridizing AI and mathematical theories of tipping points, accomplishing more than either method could on its own. After training the AI on what they characterize as a “universe of possible tipping points” that included around 500,000 models, the researchers tested it on specific real-world tipping points in various systems, including historical climate core samples.
Deep learning is making great strides in pattern recognition and classification, with the researchers having, for the first time, converted tipping-point detection into a pattern-recognition problem. This is done to try and detect the patterns that occur before a tipping point and get a machine-learning algorithm to say whether a tipping point is approaching.
“What we’ve learned is that AI is very good at detecting features of tipping points that are common to a wide variety of complex systems,” saidThomas Bury from McGill University and a co-author of the paper.
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-artificial-intelligence-reveal-climate-change.html