Climate change is continuing to get worse with time. And, if we don’t act soon, humanity might be in trouble. That was the focal point of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report released in August warns that every region of Earth will face the consequences of rising temperatures.
A new paper, published in Nature Climate Change, adds more details to that forecast. With the aid of machine learning to analyze more than 60,000 climate change-related studies, German researchers estimate that 85% of the population is affected by climate change. Max Callaghan of Berlin’s Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change was the leader of the new research.
Machine learning used for the forecast
“There is overwhelming evidence that the impacts of climate change are already being observed in human and natural systems,” the paper reads. “We infer that attributable anthropogenic impacts may be occurring across 80% of the world’s land area, where 85% of the population reside.”
Machine learning is a kind of AI that gets smarter as more information is fed to it. Callaghan and his colleagues didn’t just point out Earth’s plight as climate change impacts become worse, but also use the same tech to reveal gaps within the scientific study.
The team fed the AI called BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers) 2,373 abstracts on papers that were related to climate change. Even if those studies didn’t attribute to their findings.
Future of Earth seems worrisome
“Our objective is to map all possibly relevant studies on climate-related changes, rather than a list of studies where the relationship between an observed climate trend and specific impacts has been demonstrated with high confidence,” the paper reads. “While traditional assessments can offer relatively precise but incomplete pictures of the evidence, our machine-learning-assisted approach generates an expansive preliminary but quantifiably uncertain map.”
According to a new set of far-reaching climate projections that climate scientists from different Canadian and British universities published, by the year 2500, the Amazon forest might become a barren land and the mid-western US could become a tropical jungle,
