Episode 54: Climate Tipping Points

Voices from DARPA

In this episode of the Voices from DARPA podcast, we’ll explore a new program with the goal of better identifying and predicting sudden and catastrophic climate change tipping points. Such events could cause major and abrupt disruption to both weather and life on our planet. DARPA’s AI-assisted Climate Tipping-point Modeling (ACTM) program aims to advance artificial intelligence and machine learning to model complex processes that affect Earth’s climate, looking for signs of it going disastrously awry. You’ll hear from the program manager and people working on aspects of the problem, as well as learn about one especially troubling possibility – the slowing, or even entire collapse, of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulating current. “DARPA’s job is to help the United States avoid strategic surprise,” says ACTM program manager Joshua Elliott, “and in my mind there’s no bigger risk or strategic surprise than a sudden and massive and irreversible change in some of the key Earth systems that we rely on for survival.”