Who hasn't dreamt ever been able to predict the future? Being able to anticipate world trends, invest in this small startup that would later become numicornio, or know the result of the most important sports events (Biff Tannen in Back to the Future 2).
For climate scientists this dream began to materialize in 1979, with the acclaimed Charney Report, when a group of climate experts led by the atmospheric scientist of M.I.T Jule Charney, He met at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at the request of then-President Jimmy Carter to conduct the first comprehensive analysis of the impact of carbon dioxide on climate change. In principle, it may not sound as impressive as other gains or advances that the U.S. had made for then, as the alunizaje 10 years earlier, but the Charney Report is an example of applied science, and the success of its forecasts over the last 40 years firmly established what we know today as climate science.
What's that?
The notion that certain gases could increase the temperature of the earth due to the absorption of heat at atmospheric level was not for anything new at that time. At the theoretical level, the first to describe this behavior was French Joseph Fourier in 1824, subsequently tested at practical level by the Irish John Tyndall In the 1850s (30 years before the discovery of electron and radioactivity, concepts deeply interconnected with this phenomenon). But more than 120 years later, the existence of an increase in global temperature due to human activity continued to be controversial, and it was believed that one could even avenge a New Ice Age.Because of this, the report did not have the immediate impact expected in terms of concrete changes in state policies and behavior of society, but as its predictions were fulfilled, the Charney Report became recognized as a milestone in our understanding of the consequences of our actions on the climate. A clear sample of its certainty is that 40 years later, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, measured since Mauna Loa in Hawaii, increases by 21%, resulting in a 0.66°C temperature increase, almost exactly online with the predictions of the Charney Report, where they estimate that doubling the concentration of CO2 increases the temperature by 2.5°C.
Theory of Chaos: taming with unpredictability
The climate is not a linear system. There is an innate component of randomness even when the initial conditions are clear and the external factors are eliminated, as a casino roulette. These systems are strongly based on Theory of Chaos.The first major advance on trying to tame chaos in a system, came from the hand of the great mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz (also from M.I.T as Jule Charney) during the end of the '50s and '60s principles, when following their 1962 paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" rationalized that a small change in initial conditions can affect the long-term behavior of the weather system. This phenomenon later called him "Mariposa Effect". His conclusion at that time was that, then, it was impossible to predict the climate accurately.
However, the creation of computing has discussed this conclusion, since the ability to process large amounts of data would make this impossibility in possibility. If we could only have the ability to compute to model the behavior of the atmosphere, we could have clear the initial conditions, and thus be able to predict the climatic phenomena, both in the short and long term.
Big Data Analytics, challenges and opportunities for sustainability computing
Today, more than 40 years after that meeting in Massachussets, we have at our disposal more than ever all the power of technology and computing, and its large-scale applications in the sustainability sciences have achieved unthinking advances during the last century. The first step to solve any problem, small or large, is to understand as humanly as possible about it. For this it is important to discern how today's world is different from yesterday, and how we can use this information to quantify this change and predict future changes. NASA, for example, makes available LandSat technology to observe the surface of the earth and how it changed over the last years.But in these times as rapidly changing, with the rapid technological innovation and constant disruption of the paradigms that we have not long believed firm, it is worth mentioning that scientists and experts do not only worry about the use of existing tools, if they do not also continue to predict how to use future measures to control climate change. Similarly, as Lorenz concluded in the impossibility of predicting the climate, then tested incorrectly with the arrival of traditional computing, we should not fall into the simplicity of thinking that we reach the limit of our possibilities, and conform to the result.
Disruptive technologies like AI are already a reality, and reputed companies are already using it to anticipate solving problems that we have not yet, such as IBM and its Cleanification Maturity Model (CEMM), which proposes to use all the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to model and shape the maturation of the electrical network, in relation to the future increase of the use of it, for example with the electrification of transport.
For the future
Remarking again this idea that the biggest problems are the ones we haven't yet, everything seems to point out that the next major advance in technology applied to the climate will come from the hand of quantum computation, where the non-binary nature of them will allow us to advance in unthinkable fields just a few years ago, as for example to include in our predictive models a component that has so far never been able to be taken into account effectively, the water, because the non-linear characteristics of the fluid dynamics are perfect for modeling with quantum computers, and can thus include in the forecasts factors such as temperature, currents, and salinity of the water bodies.But this is not the only factor of the climate study that could benefit, not much less. Simulations of fundamental chemical processes, inherently quantum due to the scale in which the physics in question occurs, could lead to the discovery of new tools to combat climate change and go to a greener future in numerous industries. Today, advances are foreseen in carbon capture, electrolysis and the design of new photovoltaic materials.
However, many of these applications still live in the field of theory and hypotheses, such as Fourier's ideas there for 1824, but today more than ever we should support the entire scientific body in order to continue carrying on all this computational power and translate it into concrete solutions that improve not only social well-being, but also that of the environment. Far away we are still driving our DeLoreans flying with garbage as in that futuristic 2015 that Robert Zemeckis imagined so many years ago (just a couple after the publication of the Charney Report), but the technology at the service of weather specialists certainly has the possibility of bringing everyone to a brighter future, and above all, greener.
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