Artificial intelligence may be set to reveal climate change tipping points

Researchers are developing artificial intelligence that could assess climate change tipping points. The deep-learning algorithm could act as an early warning system against runaway climate change. In a new paper, the researchers look at thresholds beyond which rapid or irreversible change happens in a system. "We found that the new algorithm was able to not only predict the tipping points more accurately than existing approaches but also provide information about what type of state lies beyond the tipping point," said Chris Bauch, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo. "Many of these tipping points are undesirable, and we'd like to prevent them if we can." Some tipping points that are often associated with runaway climate change include melting Arctic permafrost, which could release vast amounts of methane and spur further rapid heating; breakdown of oceanic current systems, which could lead to almost immediate changes in weather patterns; or ice sheet disintegration, which could lead to rapid sea-level change.