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Can AI help solve the climate crisis?

682,917 views |

Sims Witherspoon |

TED Countdown Summit

• July 2023

"AI can be a transformational tool in our fight against climate change," says Sims Witherspoon, a leader at the AI research lab Google DeepMind. Using wind power as her case study, she explains how powerful neural networks can help us better predict Earth's changing ecosystems and accelerate the breakthrough science needed to create a carbon-free energy supply.

"AI can be a transformational tool in our fight against climate change," says Sims Witherspoon, a leader at the AI research lab Google DeepMind. Using wind power as her case study, she explains how powerful neural networks can help us better predict Earth's changing ecosystems and accelerate the breakthrough science needed to create a carbon-free energy supply.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

If you are an industry domain expert or climate scientist with a specific challenge to solve that could help the world understand, mitigate or adapt to climate change, Sims and her team would love to hear from you. Get in touch at contact-gdm-sustainability@google.com.

About the speaker

Sims Witherspoon

Sims Witherspoon

Applied AI climate scientist

See speaker profile

Techno-optimist Sims Witherspoon seeks to benefit humanity by building AI applications that solve the toughest challenges in climate science.

Google DeepMind, 2023 | Article

"Using AI to fight climate change"

Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, 2022 | Article

"AI for Net Zero Electricity: Assessing the Electricity Sector’s Readiness for AI"

David Rolnick, et al. | ACM Computing Surveys, 2022 | Article

"Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning"

Climate Change AI, 2019 | Article

"Climate Change AI Dataset Wishlist"

Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, 2021 | Article

"Climate Change and AI: Recommendations for Government Action"

Learn more

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

If you are an industry domain expert or climate scientist with a specific challenge to solve that could help the world understand, mitigate or adapt to climate change, Sims and her team would love to hear from you. Get in touch at contact-gdm-sustainability@google.com.