Tech titans tout breakthroughs in AI-driven climate models while their own emissions rise

As the planet grapples with the multivariate impacts of climate change, two titans of technology find themselves at a crossroads. Their ambitious sustainability goals collide with the increased energy demands of artificial intelligence (AI). Two recent research projects – Microsoft’s Aurora and Google’s NeuralGCM – highlight this seeming paradox, revealing both the promise and peril of AI being wielded in the battle against climate change.

On Monday, 22 July, Google publicly shared some of the findings of its research into NeuralGCM (Neural General Circulation Model), “a model that can rapidly, efficiently and accurately simulate Earth’s atmosphere”.

Stephan Hoyer, senior staff software engineer at Google Research, wrote in the blog post: “While we know that our planet is warming in unprecedented ways, what those rising temperatures will mean for our future isn’t totally clear… To try to answer these and other related questions, scientists need the ability to make accurate predictions about Earth’s climate.”

Hoyer said NeuralGCM “combines traditional physics-based modelling with ML [machine learning] for improved simulation accuracy and efficiency. This approach generates two- to 15-day weather forecasts that are more accurate than the current gold-standard physics-based model, and reproduces temperatures over a past 40-year period more accurately than traditional atmospheric models.”

For years, Google proudly touted its purported carbon neutrality. The BBC reported that in 2020 the tech behemoth claimed to have erased its entire carbon footprint by buying “high-quality carbon offsets”. 

Fast forward to 2024 and the company’s 2024 Environmental Report states that “we aim to neutralise our residual emissions with high-quality carbon removal credits by 2030, and to do so in a way that maximises our positive impact on global decarbonisation. 

“This approach represents an evolution of our strategy: starting in 2023, we’re no longer maintaining operational carbon neutrality,” it reads, as first noted in Bloomberg.  

Why, you may ask? AI, mostly. 

In the same report, Google notes that in 2023, their “total GHG emissions were 14.3 million tCO2 e [ton carbon dioxide equivalent], representing a 13% year-over-year increase and a 48% increase compared to our 2019 target base year. This result was primarily due to increases in data centre energy consumption and supply chain emissions.

“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment.”  

A similar series of events has been taking place at Microsoft.

In early June, Microsoft Research announced their own model, Aurora. The authors of the blog post presenting the findings of the research explain that Aurora is part of the answer to the question of how humanity might better prepare for extreme weather events, especially as their likelihood increases with the global average temperature. 

Aurora, they say, is a “cutting-edge AI foundation model that can extract valuable insights from vast amounts of atmospheric data”. 

“Aurora’s effectiveness lies in its training on more than a million hours of diverse weather and climate simulations, which enables it to develop a comprehensive understanding of atmospheric dynamics. This allows the model to excel at a wide range of prediction tasks, even in data-sparse regions or extreme weather scenarios.” And it does this – they say – at “at a fraction of the computational cost of traditional numerical weather-prediction systems”.  

It can also forecast a broad range of atmospheric variables, “from temperature and wind speed to air-pollution levels and concentrations of greenhouse gases”.

And like Google, Microsoft had to temper its climate ambitions recently. As reported by CNBC, Microsoft’s carbon footprint has “increased 30% compared to 2020 due to indirect emissions from the construction of data centres”.

In the company’s 2024 Environmental Sustainability report, vice-chairperson and president Brad Smith and chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa write: “New technologies, including generative AI, hold promise for new innovations that can help address the climate crisis. At the same time, the infrastructure and electricity needed for these technologies create new challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector.” 

The news is particularly important because a report by the Boston Consulting Group found that AI has the potential to help mitigate 5% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into climate science and other sectors, its energy demands will continue to grow, potentially offsetting some of the environmental benefits its proponents and tech companies aim to achieve. DM

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