🤖 Is AI Helping or Hurting Climate Change Efforts?

🌡️ Record Warm Ocean Temperatures Fuel Heat Wave

In a new study, scientists found a link between the long-lasting 2023 heatwave over the southwest United States and Mexico and the record warm sea surface temperatures in both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. The heatwave lasted from mid-June to early August, affecting over 100 million people, and was responsible for over 300 deaths. The extreme heat and drought was responsible for $14.5 billion in economic loss, making it the costliest North American weather and climate disaster in 2023. Phoenix, Arizona experienced both the longest continuous stretch of daily maximum temperature exceeding 104F (55 days) and the warmest nighttime minimum temperature on record (97F). Warm sea surface temperatures from El Nino impacted large-scale wind patterns, which then created a high-pressure system that persisted for more than six weeks, greatly increasing land surface temperatures, reducing precipitation, and causing the heatwave to grow and last.

NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory

🤖 Is AI Helping or Hurting Climate Change Efforts?

AI has been beneficial to understanding climate change in ways like helping to track Antarctic icebergs 10,000 times faster than humans and optimizing renewable energy grids in real time. But at the same time, it consumes an incredible amount of energy, creating a new level of climate pollution that threatens to undermine those benefits. Some of today’s most prominent AI systems use 100,000 GPUs, drawing as much electricity as a small city and filling server farms the size of several football fields. There are upwards of 8,000 data centers worldwide, and that number is projected to double by 2026. One study suggests that U.S. data centers could consume 12% of all U.S. electricity, estimating the energy demand will equal whole countries the size of Sweden or Argentina. AI’s environmental impacts stretch far beyond carbon emissions and energy usage, including the use of massive amounts of water needed to cool the systems and contributing to poor air quality in nearby regions.

Daisy Simmons, Yale Climate Connections

🔥 Weather Driving Iberian Wildfires is 40x More Likely

Spain recently experienced its worst wildfire season in at least three decades. Hot, dry, and windy conditions this summer fueled wildfires that experts say are 40 times more likely to recur due to human-caused climate change. The analysis conducted by 13 scientists found that the extreme conditions that drove the fires in the northwestern Iberian peninsula, including Portugal, were likely to recur every 15 years due to today’s climate. More than 1 million acres of land were burned in the European Union this summer, with two-thirds of that total occurring in Spain and Portugal. At least eight people were killed, thousands were evacuated, and railway and motorways were shut down.

Charlie Devereux, Reuters