This Website Shows How Your City Could Look In A Climate Change Catastrophe
To create the system, researchers built a computerised virtual world, similar to several blocks of the city, allowing them to control flooding and other elements so that they could create synthetic images of places before and after a climate devastation.
A website now will show you what your home might look like due to extreme climate change, decades from now.
ThisClimateDoesNotExist.com
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The website is called ThisClimateDoesNotExist.com, and it allows you to look for prominent locations across the world and based on the kind of climate change impact, give us a somewhat simulated look of what it would look like.
The website has apparently been in development for two years and was developed to create public awareness and political will to fight against the inevitable climate change.
Developed by Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and founder of Mila, she created a system that uses AI to show people how their house would look in an environmental catastrophe.
To create the system, researchers built a computerised virtual world, similar to several blocks of the city, allowing them to control flooding and other elements so that they could create synthetic images of places before and after a climate devastation.
The artificial data with real images showing flooded houses or locations affected with wildfires were used to train an AI system to take any given image from Google Street view to look like a climate catastrophe. For this, the system first had to learn where the flow of water was and then create the water in a realistic way that even show reflections of objects to make everything seem lifelike.
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Bengio said in a conversation with CNN, "Citizens in the past have been hearing about climate change coming from scientists, reports, and graphs. 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."
ThisClimateDoesNotExist.com
I tried to look at what Mumbai¡¯s Gateway of India would look like in a flood, wildfire or smog and the AI did a decent job of simulating what the place would actually look like -- straight out of hell.
Also Read: Scientists Say Young People Below Age 40 Will See Climate Change Cataclysm
There weren¡¯t many Indian locations to begin with (since India doesn¡¯t have Google Street View), but whatever locations it does have, are enough to give us all a reality check.
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