All of the descriptions you'll see on this site are ai-generated. The content may be offensive, bizarre, or misleading and is not fit for educational or scientific use.
The figures shown are not ai-generated, they are pulled from a model of a worst-case emissions trajectory called RCP8.5, you can learn more or check the results you get here.
"If all these scenarios appear to be either too unrealistic or too unpleasant, I invite readers to write their own. Here’s the one stipulation: it must involve drastic change." ––Elizabeth Kolbert, 'Three Scenarios for the Future of Climate Change'
The climate crisis is difficult to picture. Overlapping threats of heatwaves, flooding, drought, wildfires and crop failure will intensify as the planet heats up. These threats will affect different areas in different ways with all kinds of uncertainty. What might these trends look like at your grocery store? At the park across town?
This website is an attempt at making the effects of climate change feel concrete and immediate. I feed projections for point-based future temperature and precipitation data, maps of gross regional trends for threats like hurricanes or drought, and current animal habitat data to a text-generation model to create these descriptions.
For a number of reasons the descriptions generated here are not and cannot be scientific. Instead, these descriptions are more of a proof-of-concept in imagining the future at a very granular, vivid level. Sometimes the results are really interesting and exciting, other times buggy. It’s a work-in-progress and any feedback on technical, scientific, or user-experience levels is hugely appreciated.
Usage
Enter a location into the autocomplete at the top to see a novel prediction as well as actual projected temperature and precipitation data from the 2015 Localized Constructed Analogs (LOCA) data sets.
The site will accept any location in the U.S. that you can plug in to Google Maps, but some tend to be more interesting than others. The real magic is plugging in places you care about that no one else would have thought to check on.
Trying the same location will generate a different description each time. The descriptions are generated by an AI based on prompts and will often have strange or unexpected content (ex: hurricanes in Los Angeles). If you get a weird result, just retry the location and you'll see something new! If you want to let me know about a specific description you got for any reason, let me know at charlie dot dektar at gmail or through the feedback feature.
Methods and Sources
The key to this whole site is OpenAI's GPT-3 model that does the actual work of writing these descriptions on-demand.
These projections are made with prompts written by me and Kathleen Radigan filled in with data from these sources:
Huge thanks to Kathleen Radigan for ideas, prompts used in the site, and early testing. Thank you to the creators of Norco for the beautiful pixel art used on the home page. Bobby L. Kim gave me great feedback early on which made the site much easier to use. Peter Ballmer went above and beyond with ideas for thoughts and features, including the flickering loading animation. Thanks also to Becky Goodman and Magellan J. Pfluke for bouncing around ideas and early testing, and Katie Dektar for offering actionable, necessary feedback on the UI/UX. Thank you to OpenAI for beta access to develop this site, this entire project is possible only with their incredible model.
