The Climate Summit embraces AI, with reservations

Artificial intelligence was a breakthrough during the opening days of COP28, the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Entrepreneurs and researchers dazzled attendees with predictions that rapidly improving technology could accelerate the world’s efforts to combat climate change and adapt to rising temperatures.

But they have also raised concerns about AI’s potential to sap energy and harm people and the planet.

Exactly one year after the blockbuster debut of ChatGPT, the chatbot that introduced AI to hundreds of millions of people, the climate summit opened last week with a series of events and announcements highlighting AI technology. Many were filled with representatives from Microsoft, Google and other power players in the emerging AI industry.

Hopes for AI breakthroughs in the fight against rising global temperatures stem from the technology’s ability to process large amounts of information. This allows it to deliver insights and efficiencies far beyond what computers and data scientists have been able to do, with a wide range of climate applications.

The United Nations said on the opening day of the summit that it is working with Microsoft on a AI-powered tracking tool whether countries will fulfill their pledges to reduce fossil fuel emissions, helping to solve one of the thorniest issues in international climate diplomacy.

Other groups offered research highlighting AI’s potential to reduce emissions in manufacturing and food production, help locate new renewable energy projects, and balance electricity loads during extreme weather events.

Google and Boston Consulting Group officials predicted that AI could help reduce its impact as much as one-tenth of all greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. A team of researchers led by David Sandalow, a former U.S. Energy Department official in President Barack Obama’s administration who now works at Columbia University, published what it called a road map on Sunday for AI’s role in accelerating emissions reductions across a wide range of sectors.

In an interview at the conference, Mr. Sandalow said he was particularly excited about the potential ways AI could accelerate the discovery and design of new materials for low-emission energy technologies such as advanced batteries.

“When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he physically took different metals to test how they would react to electrical charges – it took him months to identify the best options,” Mr Sandalow said. “Today, with AI tools, we can test a million different options in a second and impose chemical structural constraints to figure out what is realistic and quickly accelerate the pace of innovation.”

In a panel discussion on Sunday morningAccording to business leaders, AI is already helping their companies issue warnings to people at risk of flooding, sending text messages with hyper-local planting advice to farmers dealing with drought, and helping people exposed to high levels of air pollution when determining the safest times to go outside.

They also said concerns about technology were keeping them from doing more.

“Climate change is a man-made existential threat,” Natalie Blyth, global head of Commercial Banking Sustainability at HSBC, said at the event. “What we don’t want is to go from one man-made situation to another,” she said, referring to crises. “So we have to be responsible and ethical, and very careful, in how we release and understand some of these technologies.”

Leaders at the companies developing AI technology have already warned that it could one day pose a risk of extinction to humanity on par with nuclear war. Researchers at COP28 have focused on another risk: that the computing power required to run advanced AI could be enormous. That hunger for electricity could skyrocket emissions and worsen climate change.

A peer-reviewed analysis published in October estimated that AI systems worldwide could consume as much energy as all of Sweden by 2027. That would almost certainly increase emissions, even if countries fall short of their pledges to reduce them. (A Study by the Boston Consulting Group as Google also noted that powering AI would most likely require large amounts of water and produce an increasing amount of waste.)

Researchers and company representatives said they hoped AI’s relative benefits on the climate would outweigh the significant energy consumption required to power it. But they weren’t sure.

Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, said in an interview that AI created a huge additional demand for energy. To address this, he said Microsoft was working to improve the sustainability of its data centers and help develop more renewable energy.

“We need to maximize the benefits this can bring to the whole economy, including in terms of sustainability, and ensure it is all powered by carbon-free energy with more energy efficient data centres,” Mr Smith said. “Can I make a mathematical equation? Not yet.”

Environmental groups at the summit seemed to largely embrace the technology. One coalition of them, called We Don’t Have Time, launched one series of videos the final week of young activists calling for more urgent climate action, with a twist.

The activists appeared as simulated middle-aged versions of themselves, as if speaking from the future. The aging, the group said, was handled by AI

David Gelles reporting contributed.