Using AI to Detect Climate Tipping Points- Or Why It’s Hard to Understand Rapid Changes in the Earth System

Anand Gnanadesikan, Jay Brett, Jennifer Sleeman, David Chung

Keywords: AI, climate change, earth, system

Abstract: While rapid shifts in climate are seen throughout Earth’s history, the dynamics which give rise to them are still obscured. This limits our ability to predict potential tipping points caused by human activity. In this paper, we discuss how Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be used to address the challenge of understanding tipping points by reducing the dimensionality of the Earth System, allowing for the isolation of key mechanisms and critically important parameters. We consider two examples of how AI might be used to examine such tipping points, one involving the ocean overturning circulation, the other involving ocean biogeochemical cycling.