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Understanding the enormity of climate change is almost as mind-blowing as understanding the ultimate effect of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (the virus that causes Covid-19) in America and the world.
But a free, interactive tool created by artificial intelligence startup HyperGiant helps put both global crises and their relationships with each other in perspective.
The “ACES: A post Covid Emissions Simulator” allows you to adjust pandemic-induced behaviors such as the percentage of Americans working from home and the reduced number of air travel to calculate how much carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere if those changes were to be made permanent.
For example, if 30% of the workforce works from home, air traffic is reduced by 50% and people eat 15% less meat, according to the tool that removes 18 billion tons of carbon dioxide. carbon, which is 38% of the way to The changes dictated by the Paris climate agreement. (The United States signed the international environmental agreement in 2015 and promised to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by about a quarter by 2030 from 2005 levels. In 2019, the US officially withdrew. of the commission).
The tool also enables users to activate new technologies, such as carbon capture, renewable energy generation and revolutionary agriculture and land management strategies: to see what it would take to achieve the necessary carbon neutral emission reductions (where total net carbon emissions are equal to zero, either by reducing your carbon emissions to zero or supporting enough carbon offset programs for your offsets) offset your emissions.
For example, if 30% of the workforce works from home, air traffic is reduced by 50% and people eat 15% less meat (as stated in the first part of the interactive tool above), and then it also adds the option to make all vehicles in the US USA If they are electric, that would eliminate 33 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050, according to the simulator. (While that satisfies the Paris Agreement, it is not enough “to achieve carbon neutrality and avoid the worst effects of climate change,” says the simulator.)
“One of the most difficult things to understand climate change is understanding the size of the real climate problem relative to the size of possible solutions. If I tell you that we will not be emitting billions of tons of CO2 as a result of Covid-19, That sounds a lot unless you know how to compare it to the size of the greenhouse gas crisis, “HyperGiant climate adviser Noam Bar-Zemer told CNBC Make It.” This tool makes it easier for people to compare and understand the impact of the proposed solutions “.
Founded in 2018 with more than 230 employees, Austin, Texas-based HyperGiant works with companies in industries from space to healthcare to solve problems and increase efficiency through artificial intelligence solutions. The company scores “eight-eighths” in revenue, CEO Ben Lamm told CNBC Make It.
“The climate crisis is one of our greatest threats to humanity that we will face,” Ben Lamm, CEO of HyperGiant, told CNBC Make It. “We want people to better understand climate change and to act better.”
Photo courtesy of HyperGiant
The tool, which HyperGiant says doesn’t make the company money, It was built with emissions data from multiple sources, including the Environmental Information Administration (EIA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to a written statement from the company. (Of the tool, the EPA told CNBC Make It: “It is too early to draw conclusions or offer a reaction, and more analysis is needed.” In addition, the EPA noted the tool airnow.gov, where people can view information on air quality and forecasts. The EIA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“We will continue to improve and iterate the model and hope that in the future it can be even more useful to governments and policy makers as they work to think, visualize and understand the extent of climate change,” Lamm tells CNBC Make It.
Seeing the amount of global change at the population level that will be needed to move the climate crisis away from the disaster is also intended to be a wake-up call, Lamm says.
“We wanted people to understand and be able to visualize how their actions impact our cloud of cumulative emissions. I think we talk a lot about individual action, which is important, but we also have to put pressure on people to push for collective action and governance if we’re going to change things in the long run, “Lamm tells CNBC Make It.
The tool “illustrates very well the scale of the emissions problem and the set of changes needed to address it. There is no silver bullet for climate change,” Rob Jackson, professor of Earth System Sciences at Stanford University and president of the Global Carbon Project, tells CNBC Make It. However, it could be easier to use, he says. “The graph is complicated and could be more accessible to a diverse audience outside of science.”
In addition to making climate change numbers more accessible, another objective of the tool is to illustrate that while the behavioral changes of the pandemic have had a positive impact on climate change, the emissions crisis is far from over.
“We saw a lot of inaccurate news about climate change and we wanted to make sure that people understood that the quarantine did not actually stop or increase the long-term dangers associated with the climate crisis,” Lamm tells CNBC Make It.
People were looking at reports and satellite images of some types of emissions fading in big cities as manufacturing and transportation shut down, “and they thought greenhouse gases were also evaporating,” says Bar-Zemer. “‘The planet was improving as the economy slowed down,’ the narrative said. In truth, this is not what was happening.”
The pandemic blockade caused a reduction in the emission of certain gases that quickly dissipate from the atmosphere, according to Bar-Zemer. But there was no reduction in carbon dioxide, a harmful greenhouse gas that “can remain in the atmosphere for centuries,” he says. “It was not disappearing with the slowdown in emissions. It was just hanging out, catching the heat as it always has. And when we start to recover the economy, we will be almost back where we started.”
See also:
What it’s like to invent a coronavirus vaccine in the middle of a pandemic
Bill Gates: How the coronavirus pandemic can help the world solve climate change
Look inside the hospital in China where coronavirus patients were treated by robots
