Try a New Tool Showing Future Climate Impacts on Your Home Today

Meet innovators using artificial intelligence to bring home the future impacts of climate indecision today.

Welcome to Sustain What - my journalistic journey toward building a cooler relationship between people, our planet and each other. Subscribe here to receive my dispatches free of charge. There'll be a way to support this project soon, but content will always be open. A perennial quest is how to bring the future into the room today. Here's the latest step.

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I just ran a Columbia Climate School Sustain What webcast with two innovators from the "A.I. for Humanity" group at Mila Quebec - a team of more than 500 researchers exploring ways to use machine intelligence to advance science and society.

They just launched This Climate Does Not Exist - a tool for envisioning possible climate, fire and pollution impacts almost anywhere people live or work. Go to their site and enter any address on the planet where Google Street View has added images of structures - your home, your childhood home, a landmark. The Result? Jarring A.I.-generated renderings of flood, fire or smog impacts.

You can watch our chat on Facebook Live here and on YouTube here:

You'll meet Victor Schmidt and Sasha Luccioni, two leaders of the team that created This Climate Does Not Exist.

Sasha Luccioni explained their goals this way: "People will tend to know that [they're in] a flood prone region or a fire-prone region. But it's not quite the same when you see it on paper and when you actually see your house that you want to buy or build surrounded by wildfire smoke or surrounded by water. This I feel like it's like a missing link in our brains."

They're working to make the link.

We were also joined by Marco Tedesco, a Columbia Climate School scientist and engineer working from the heights of Greenland's ice sheet to corporate board rooms to help shape better decisions around current and projected risks.

I posed my own questions about this tool's strengths and limitations. But I would love to hear your thoughts. If you can, type in an address here, check out the results and let me know your reactions.

Here's an address near me - a historic restaurant down on the Hudson River waterfront in my town.

Click here to enter an address and see climate futures.

By the way, this is not some faraway future. This is a tidal part of the Hudson, affected by rising sea levels. This spot is increasingly flooded already. Even the fiery smoke condition is not a fantasy. While we have very little significant wildfire risk in the current climate, our Hudson Valley skies have frequently been filled with smoke from wildfires in Canada and the West this year.

Sea level futures - your choice

Another tool for visualizing sea-level futures was launched this week by my friends at Climate Central. Drawing on peer-reviewed research, they generated 180 vistas of famous landmarks or cityscapes showing water levels under an unchanged global path for greenhouse-gas emissions and one that, if achieved (yes, this is very unlikely) would hit the ultimate goal of the Paris Agreement - limiting warming to less than 1.5 degrees C. above the 19th century climate.

As the website says, "Climate and energy choices this decade will influence how high sea levels rise for hundreds of years. Which future will we choose?"

Here's Havana.

Climate Central also has a mapping tool showing two coastal outcomes. Poke around and let me know what you see, and feel.

For years, I've been promoting and discussing ways to use the explosively expanding array of data sets and tools charting environmental and community change to create dynamic maps of both risk and opportunity. This tweet captures some of what's possible:

At the same, it's important not to be seduced by all of this data, visualization and exciting capacity to experiment.

There's still very little clear understanding of what works, what might actually jog humans to get ahead of themselves and restrain the present to liberate the future, as the economist Richard Lazarus once put it.

I discussed this challenge, and how to attack it, on a recent Sustain What show with a great group of visual experimenters and Ulrike Hahn, a young scientist working at the intersection of art, data and impact. Watch on Facebook here or YouTube:

What do you think!? Point me to successes and failures and pathways.

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