SOLEDAD: IS CLIMATE CHANGE AN ABSTRACT CONCEPT? SCIENTISTS AROUND THE OBGLE HAVE ANSWERED WITH A RESOUNDING NO. THEY POINT TO STRENGTHENING HURRICANES, WIDESPRE DADROHTS,UG AND THE INCREASING NUMBER AND INTENSITY OF HEAT WAS.VE IN FACT, RECORDS FROM THE LAST THREE MONTHS SHOW NEARLY ONEN I THREE AMERICANS LIVE IN A COUN HIT BY A WEATHER DISASTER. SOLEDAD: WITH THAT EVIDENCE,HY ARE THERE STILL SO MANY CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS? PROFESSOR KATHARINE HAYHOE IS AN ATMOSPHERIC SCIENTIST AND AN EVANGELICAL RICHSTIAN WHO STUDIES CLIMATE-FUELED DISASTS. HER LATEST BOOK, RELEASETHD WEEK, IS CALLED "SAVING US: A CLIMATE SCIENTISTāS CASEOR HOPE AND HEALING IN A DIVIDED WORLD." DR. KATHARINE HAYHOE, WHAT A PLEASURE TO TALK TO YOU. I ALWAYS ENJOY OUR CONVERSATIONS. WHAT LED YOU TO WRITE THIS BOOK? PROF. HAYHOE: THOUSANDS OF CONVERSATIONS, MANY OF WHICH DIDNāT GO WELL. I STARTED TO REALIZE THAT WHEN WE APPROACHED THIS ISSUE FROM A PERSPECTIVE OF, WELL, I CARE ABOUT IT BECAUSE OF WHO AMI . AND IF YOU DONāT CARE ABOUT IT, YOU HAVE THE WRONG VALUES OR THE WRONG PRIORITIES. THOSE CONVERSATIONS NEVER GO WELL, BUT IF YOU STOP AND U GET TO KNOW SOMEBODY, AND YOU FIND OUT THAT, YOU KNOW WHAT, THEY DO CARE ABOUT A LOT OF THINGS. THEY WANT TO BE A GOOD PERSON. THEY CARE ABOUT THEIR FAMILY. ITāS NOT JUST IYOU F CARE ABOUT HUGGING TREES OR POLAR BEARSR O WHALES, IT IS IF YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR CHILDRENāS HETHIFAL YOUāRE A MOM, IF YOU CARE ABOUT THE PLACE WHERE YOU LIVE AND YOU DONāT WANT YOUR HOUSE TOE FLOODED. IF THEREāS A PLACE ON THIS WORLD THAT YOU WANT TO BRING YOUR KIDS TO AND HAVE ITTILL S BE THE SAME AS YOU REMEMBER. IF YOU CARE ABOUT A HEALTHY ECONOMY, WHATEVER YOU CARE ABOUT, CLIMATE CHANGE IS ALRDYEA AFFECTING SOMETHING THATāS AT THE VERY TOP OF YOUR PRIORITY LIST TODAY. SOLEDAD: IT SEEMS LIKE ARGUING WITH THE CYNIC IS NOT ABOUT TELLING THEM YOUR VALUESBU, UNDERSTANDING THEIR VALUES AND THEN CONNECTING IT TO SOME OF THE DATA AROUND ENVIRONMENLTA SCIEE. PROF. HAYHOE: I THINK THATHA WT HOLDS A LOT OF US BACK FROM HAVING THOSE CONVERSATIONS, IN ADDITION TO THE FEAR THAT WEāRE JUST GOING TO END UP MORE DEPRESSEAND D DISCOURAGED WHEN WE STARTED, THE OTHER FEAR THAT HOLDS US BACK IS IāM NOT A SCIENTISTS. YOU KNOW, WHAT AM I SUPPOSEDO T SAY ABOUT TEMPERATURE RECORDS AND CIEāS AND GLOBAL AVERAGES? BUT HEREāS THE GOOD NEWS. I DONāT THINK THAT THAT INFORMATION IS WHAT CHANGES PEOPLEāS MINDS AND HEARTS. SO, THE MOST IMPORTANT CONVERSATIONS THAT WE CAN HAVE ARE NOT ABOUT THE SCIENCE. THEYāRE ABOUT THINGS THAT MATTER TO US. I LOVE TALKING ABOUT WHATāS HAPPENING HERE IN TEXAS, THAT WE GET 23% OF OUR ELECTRICITY FROM CLEAN SOURCES. I LOVE TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT THE FACT THAT, HEY, DID YOU KNOW THAT FOOD WASTE IS A BIG PART OF THE PROBLEM? WE CAN CUT DOWN ON HOW MUCH FOOD WE WASTE, AND WE CAN HELTHP E PLANET, TOO. SOLEDAD: SO IF THE MOST VALUED PEOPLE ARE OUR FENRIDSND A FAMILY MEMBERS, AND HOW DO YOU START THAT CONVERSATION? LIKE, LITERALLY, WHAT DO YOU SAY? PROF. HAYHOE: YOU WANT TO OPEN IT WITH SOMETHING THAT YOU AGREE WITH THEM ON, NOT SOMETHING UYO DISAGREE WITH THEM ON, SOMETHING THAT THEYāRE INTERESTED IN, THAT THEYāRE PASSIONATE ABOUT, THAT THEY CARE ABOUT. I HAVE STARTED CONVERSATIONS BY TALKING ABOUT KNITTING, LITERALLY, OR BY TALKING ABOUT THE FACT THAT I AM A MOM, TALKING ABOUT MY CHILD, TALKING ABOUT THE PLACE WHERE I LIVE, TALKING OUT ABTHINGS THAT I LOVE DOING. START WITH SOMETHING THAT YOU BOTH SHARE. IT COULD BE A SHARED LOVE OF BEER, AND THAT IS TOTALLY FINE. IT COULD BE THAT YOU BOTH PLAY TENNIS OR YOU RUN OUTSIDE. START WITH SOMETHING YOU BHOT CARE ABOUT AND CONNECT THE DOTS TO HOW CLIMATE CHANGE IS AFFECTING THE THING THAT BOTH MATTERS TO YOU. SOLEDAD: ARE YOU CONFIDENT O MAYBE "OPTIMISTIC" IS A BETTER WORD, THAT WEāRE GOING TO ESE REAL PROGRESS OVER THE NEXT DECADE? PROF. HAYHOE: IāM AFRAID THAT WEāRE GOING TO SEE A CHANGE IN PEOPLEāS OPINIONS AS THEY START BTOE IMPACTED BY THE INCREASINGLY DEVASTATED WEATRHE EVENTS. AT THAT POINT, IT MEANS ITāS TOO LATE. THE IMPACTS ARE ALREADY HERE. THATāS WHY ITāS SO IMPORTANT TO CONNECT THE DOTS, TO SAYYO, KNOW WHAT? THERE WAS A MASSIVE HEAT WAVE OUT WEST. DID YOU KNOW THAT HEAT WAVTHE PAST SUMMER WAS 150 TIMES MORE LIKELY BECAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE? HOW DID IT AFFECT YOU, YOUR KIDS? WHAT ABOUT THE WILDFIRE OKSME? YOU COULDNāT EVEN LET YOUR KIDS
This website helps you imagine what extreme climate change will do to your home
![CNN logo]()
Updated: 3:26 PM CDT Oct 14, 2021
On ThisClimateDoesNotExist.com you can look up any address ā your house, landmarks like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, Times Square in New York or San Francisco's "Painted Ladies" homes ā and get a surprisingly realistic sense of what it could look like if that place was struck by flood, wildfires or smog. The website, which does this by using AI trained on images of such scenes to re-imagine pictures from Google Street View, was created by researchers at Mila, an AI research institute in Montreal.The website, which was unveiled Thursday, has been in the works for two years. It began with the realization that while we have tools to face climate change, an enormous obstacle to dealing with it is public awareness and political will, said Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and founder of Mila, who also led the research team for the project. Bengio, a Turing Award winner, said the researchers wanted to create images that felt personal, which led to the idea of using AI to show what your house might look like during an environmental catastrophe."Citizens in the past have been hearing about climate change coming from scientists, reports, and graphs," Bengio said. "And there is a cognitive aspect, which is, something doesn't scare us so much if it's not right in front of our eyes."Climate scientists reported in August the world is already around 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels. Temperatures should stay below 1.5 degrees, they say ā a critical threshold to avoid the most severe impacts of the climate crisis. With every fraction of a degree of warming, the consequences of climate change worsen. Even limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, scientists say the kinds of extreme weather the world experienced this summer, including flash floods and more devastating hurricanes, will become more severe and more frequent.ThisClimateDoesNotExist can show you such images that make your home or, say, the Leaning Tower of Pisa appear to be truly flooded or covered in smoke or smog. But creating these visuals isn't as simple as placing an image of water in front of a building or adding a diaphanous filter.There aren't many pairs of images out there showing homes before and after a flood ā the kind of data that would be helpful for training an AI system on the relationship between the image it's being fed and what it should turn it into. To compensate for this, researchers started by building a computerized virtual world. This world, the equivalent of several blocks of a city, let them control flooding and other elements so they could create synthetic images of places "before" and "after" a climate catastrophe, said Sasha Luccioni, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal and Mila and a lead researcher on the project.This synthetic data, along with real images showing flooded houses and pictures of smokey orange skies and smog, was used to train an AI system to take any given image from Google Street View and make it look like a climate catastrophe was at hand. To do this, the system needed to first learn where, for instance, water should go in a given image, and then essentially paint water in a realistic-looking way, including reflections of objects poking out of the water and considerations for the lighting of the image.After a user types in an address and ThisClimateDoesNotExist generates images, the website encourages the user to share them with others and presents resources to learn more about climate change and fight it."I think what we want is to channel that initial, like, 'Oh man, my house is underwater,' into climate action," Luccioni said.ā CNN's Rachel Ramirez contributed to this report.
On you can look up any address ā your house, landmarks like the in Paris, in New York or San Francisco's ā and get a surprisingly realistic sense of what it could look like if that place was struck by flood, wildfires or smog. The website, which does this by using AI trained on images of such scenes to re-imagine pictures from Google Street View, was created by researchers at , an AI research institute in Montreal.
The website, which was unveiled Thursday, has been in the works for two years. It began with the realization that while we have tools to face climate change, an enormous obstacle to dealing with it is public awareness and political will, said Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and founder of Mila, who also led the research team for the project. Bengio, a Turing Award winner, said the researchers wanted to create images that felt personal, which led to the idea of using AI to show what your house might look like during an environmental catastrophe.
"Citizens in the past have been hearing about climate change coming from scientists, reports, and graphs," Bengio said. "And there is a cognitive aspect, which is, something doesn't scare us so much if it's not right in front of our eyes."
Climate scientists reported in August the world is already around 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels. Temperatures should stay below 1.5 degrees, they say ā a critical threshold to avoid the most severe impacts of the climate crisis. With every fraction of a degree of warming, the consequences of climate change worsen. Even limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, scientists say the kinds of extreme weather the world experienced this summer, including flash floods and more devastating hurricanes, will become more severe and more frequent.
ThisClimateDoesNotExist can show you such images that make your home or, say, the appear to be truly flooded or covered in smoke or smog. But creating these visuals isn't as simple as placing an image of water in front of a building or adding a diaphanous filter.
There aren't many pairs of images out there showing homes before and after a flood ā the kind of data that would be helpful for training an AI system on the relationship between the image it's being fed and what it should turn it into. To compensate for this, researchers started by building a computerized virtual world. This world, the equivalent of several blocks of a city, let them control flooding and other elements so they could create synthetic images of places "before" and "after" a climate catastrophe, said Sasha Luccioni, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal and Mila and a lead researcher on the project.
This synthetic data, along with real images showing flooded houses and pictures of smokey orange skies and smog, was used to train an AI system to take any given image from Google Street View and make it look like a climate catastrophe was at hand. To do this, the system needed to first learn where, for instance, water should go in a given image, and then essentially paint water in a realistic-looking way, including reflections of objects poking out of the water and considerations for the lighting of the image.
After a user types in an address and ThisClimateDoesNotExist generates images, the website encourages the user to share them with others and presents resources to learn more about climate change and fight it.
"I think what we want is to channel that initial, like, 'Oh man, my house is underwater,' into climate action," Luccioni said.
ā CNN's Rachel Ramirez contributed to this report.
