Artificial intelligence can do some pretty amazing things, including for the climate. But, as with most technology, there are significant trade offs. The energy used by AI is massive and growing. 

Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are building enormous data centers to make AI possible. Karen Hao, a contributing writer for the Atlantic who also has an engineering degree from MIT, visited one of these data centers in Arizona. It was a 97 degree day, and the data center stretched on into the desert. Hao decided she would walk around it to get a visceral idea of how big it is. She says, “Within two legs of the rectangle. I just started feeling very, very heat exhausted and I'd run out of water. It had already taken me around 20, 25 minutes and I was like, I gotta get out of here.” Companies are making huge investments in giant data centers. Hao says Microsoft alone is spending around 10 billion a quarter now on data centers. 

Most of the hype right now is around generative AI. Think: ChatGPT. As a matter of fact, the G in ChatGPT stands for generative. The basic idea is that AI is being fed our data to train models that generate more data like that. Karen Hao says, “It's taking our writing to generate more writing. It's taking our images to generate more images.” 

But not all flavors of AI use the same amount of energy. Much of theAI that might benefit the  reasons is referred to as predictiveAI. Predictive AI tends to use existing data to help it make predictions, rather than generating new sentences or images the way generative AI does. For example: it might use our images to make a prediction about what's in another image. Hao says, “Like cancer detection systems or facial recognition systems.” And predictive AI uses far less energy. This is because predictive AI is trained on a specific task, and once it achieves the desired accuracy, its energy use falls dramatically. 

Predictive AI is also being used to track emissions. Climate TRACE, an independent greenhouse gas emissions tracker backed by former Vice President Al Gore, is one such organization. Gavin McCormick, Co-Founder of Climate TRACE, says, “we can see that some steel facilities pollute about 10 times more emissions than others to produce the same product.” That data helped companies like GM and Tesla switch to steel factories that produced less emissions. McCormick says, “Our hope is that this is a way that data can make it kind of painless to reduce emissions.” 

“AI is being used in all sorts of ways to facilitate climate action from things like helping us better forecast solar power on electric power grids in order to help us balance grids with large amounts of renewables,” says Priya Donti, Assistant Professor at MIT and Co-founder and Chair of Climate Change AI. Efficiency is one of the best ways to reduce carbon pollution. If we didn't need so much power, we wouldn't need to burn so much fossil fuel. With more efficiency we could switch to renewable energy more quickly. AI can help do that, even with simple tasks like optimizing heating and cooling systems in homes and buildings to save energy.  

Nowcasting is a weather forecasting model that combines a description of the current state of the atmosphere and a short-term forecast. Amy McGovern, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oklahoma, says, “our current average [nowcasting] warning is about 15 minutes. Can you imagine if you could bring that up to 30 minutes or 60 minutes?”  McGovern also says, “As our climate is changing, a lot of these extreme weather events are changing. And I think AI can be used to help us improve our prediction and understanding of these events and, and be able to weather them better.”

Ozark Highlands Radio is a weekly radio program that features live music and interviews recorded at Ozark Folk Center State Park’s beautiful 1,000-seat auditorium in Mountain View, Arkansas.  In addition to the music, our “Feature Host” segments take listeners through the Ozark hills with historians, authors, and personalities who explore the people, stories, and history of the Ozark region.

This week, a special road trip episode.  OHR visits Rogers, Arkansas’ Railyard Live Concert Series featuring Eureka Springs hard-driving folk quartet, Front Porch, recorded live at Butterfield Stage in Railyard Park in historic downtown Rogers.  Also, commentary from Rogers Arts & Culture Coordinator Kinya Christian on the exciting things happening in the Rogers Entertainment District.

Rogers, Arkansas’ Railyard Live Concert Series began in 2021.  Held on the city’s Butterfield Stage next to Railyard Park in historic downtown Rogers, it features live concerts every weekend throughout the Spring, Summer, and Fall.  All of the Railyard Live events are either free to the public or at very low cost of admission.  The concert series features a wide array of musical styles and interests designed to appeal to the diverse population of Rogers and invite them to experience the newly revitalized Railyard Entertainment District.  The Ozark Folk Center State Park and the City of Rogers, Arkansas partnered to bring Ozark Highlands Radio to capture a little slice of this modern Ozark culture.

Front Porch is a hard driving four piece folk ensemble.  Self described as “contemporary bluegrass, old time and mayhem from Northwest Arkansas,” the band is based in Eureka Springs.  Front Porch is Petey Wesley on banjo & fiddle, John Henry Holthus on guitar, Alex Hawf on mandolin, and Cameron Keeling rounding out the low end with upright bass.  In true bluegrass fashion, all the guys in the band sing, but that’s where the traditional ends.  Front Porch performs with all the usual ingredients of bluegrass and folk but bakes them up into a post-punk old-time acid jazz barn-burning bluegrass fusion that will have you jumping.

In this week’s “From the Vault” segment, OHR producer Jeff Glover offers a 1981 archival recording of Ozark original Uncle Floyd Holland performing the tune “Nellie Gray,” from the Ozark Folk Center State Park archives.

In this week’s guest host segment, renowned traditional folk musician, writer, and step dancer Aubrey Atwater explores variations of the traditional folk song “Polly Put the Kettle On.”

A decades-old lunar mystery gets an update in this week's Planetary Radio. Matt Siegler from the Planetary Science Institute shares his team's surprising findings about the granite formation that might lie beneath Compton-Belkovich, a thorium-rich hot spot on the far side of the Moon. Then Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, shares What's Up in the night sky.

Deep dive: Mercury’s tantalizing promise of endless gold in South America. Mercury’s a known pollutant in fish, but did you know one of the biggest mercury emitters is actually small-scale gold mining? From sunken ships to shihuahuaco trees, we take a deep dive into the astounding history and science of mercury and the solutions that could break its toxic cycle.

ClassicalWorks (Episode 182)

We’re calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first century—could she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. And then she famously covered the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi minister of death. Her study of the origins of totalitarianism keeps her current fifty years after her death and, pointedly, in our own rancorous presidential campaign of 2024.

In this podcast, the surprise turns on finding a profound humanity and hope, believe it or not, in the collected wisdom of Hannah Arendt. She noted in one essay, “We are free to change the world.” Our guest, Lyndsey Stonebridge, lifted that line for the title of her gripping, fresh take on Hannah Arendt. We Are Free to Change the World is her title, and thinking has everything to do with it. 

Here in the US, April 15th is upon us, and as Benjamin Franklin opined on the viability of the fledgeling US Constitution, "...in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes."  So, this hour, Katie Marie and Joe put together an hour of trad music about death, taxes, and being too poor to pay the excise man.

The artists this week: Trian, Ann Gray, Tommy Martin, Padraig Rynne, Ed Miller, Poor Man's Gambit, Karine Polwart, Hannah Harris, Danú, Altan, Poor Man's Fortune, Open The Door For Three, Donogh Hennessy, and Yanks.

Our FairPlé score this week: 50