A recent post at the Daily Mail (MailOnline) titled “Revealed: What life on Earth will look like in 2100 – with entire cities plunged underwater and millions of people perishing in the heat,” uses artificial intelligence (AI) image generation to create apocalyptic pictures of various locations, supposedly replicating what the world will look like in 2100 due to climate change. The AI generated images are entertaining, but lack a basis in solid evidence or data. While the MailOnline tries to dress the post up with supposed facts, it really presents nothing more than science fiction, just like the movies the story references in the article’s opening sentence.
The MailOnline post opens by referencing Snowpiercer and The Day After Tomorrow, saying “scientists predict that the reality might be far more shocking than anything imagined by a Hollywood studio.”
The MailOnline claims they “used the latest scientific research to predict how the world will be in 2100,” by using the Google ImageFX image generator.
The article covers major themes; “rising temperatures,” “melting ice and higher sea levels,” “more extreme weather,” “raging wildfires,” “choking air pollution,” and “millions dead.” Each is accompanied by an AI generated image of a major city with apocalyptic conditions
Regarding rising temperatures, the MailOnline makes a lot out of the claim that last year was “the first year where average temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above the pre-industrial record.” This value is not a scientifically established threshold of danger, but rather a political one, as discussed by Climate Realism, here. Even so, after apparently 12 months of average global temperatures past this level, nothing happened. The drivers behind temperature spikes in 2023-24 are entirely natural, between a powerful El Niño and massive amounts of water vapor being blasted into the stratosphere by an underwater volcano’s eruption. Temperatures are now falling as the water vapor cycles out and the ocean currents have changed.
The MailOnline likewise hypes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models predicting future warming, especially warning about the 2.7°C and 4.4°C warming scenarios. A Climate Realism guest post by scientist Judith Curry describes the problem with those scenarios, and how scientists are shifting away from them:
Circa 2013 with publication of the IPCC AR5 Report, RCP8.5 was regarded as the business-as-usual emissions scenario, with expected warming of 4 to 5oC by 2100. Now there is growing acceptance that RCP8.5 is implausible, and RCP4.5 is arguably the current business-as-usual emissions scenario. Only a few years ago, an emissions trajectory that followed RCP4.5 with 2 to 3oC warming was regarded as climate policy success. As limiting warming to 2oC seems to be in reach (now deemed to be the “threshold of catastrophe”), the goal posts were moved in 2018 to reduce the warming target to 1.5oC.
The same questionable “science” is used in the section on “melting ice and higher sea levels,” in which a scientist interviewed by the author, University College London Professor Julienne Stroeve, insists that summer sea ice will “for sure be gone well before 2100” and that this rate of change is too fast to adapt to for both humans and animals. This is, of course, nonsense. Earlier predictions of sea ice disappearance, here and here, for example have proven wrong repeatedly. In fact, data show that summer minimum Arctic sea ice extent has remain unchanged since 2007, as detailed in Climate at a Glance: Arctic Sea Ice, indicating a possible “regime shift” to a new stable ice extent.
Claims that extreme weather and wildfires will worsen were also covered by the MailOnline post, again with real-world data contradicting them and no mention of that in the article itself, just more scary AI images. In fact, data from NASA and the European Space Agency both find that wildfires have declined significantly during the recent modest warming.
The next section covers air pollution, and it is the weakest section in terms of presentation and the author reaching to make worrying predictions that just don’t hold up under careful thought. The whole section assumes that regions with current air pollution issues will do nothing to address them, which is foolish to assume. As countries become wealthier, they consistently invest more into producing environmental quality. As places like Delhi, which suffer from severe seasonal air pollution invest in scrubbers and other technology air quality should improve there as it has in the United States and Europe. The DailyOnline admits that wealthy countries have seen improved air over time, but what they don’t acknowledge is that our fossil fuel consumption has increased at the same time. If nations are allowed to develop, and they value clean air, air quality will improve.
Finally, MailOnline opens with the shocking header “millions dead,” and pairs it with an image of an abandoned Barcelona. The argument presented comes from a recent alarming and unverified study that claims to have found that millions of Europeans will die because of global warming and associated heatwaves in coming years. Meteorologist Anthony Watts took this study on in the post “No, Associated Press, the Projected Increase in Heat-Related Deaths in Europe is Statistical Fearmongering,” where he points out that the emissions scenario RCP 8.5 mentioned earlier in this post formed the basis of the study making that extreme claim. RCP 8.5 is discredited; recent peer reviewed studies have found it impossible and has implausibly high temperature projections. In fact, data clearly show that as the Earth has warmed slightly, temperature related deaths have fallen dramatically.
This whole MailOnline post is simply manipulative; there is nothing scientifically rigorous about the images generated by the MailOnline, and their “facts” are not facts at all. It is rather poor form in the AI generation world to neglect to show your prompts, something tells me that the prompts for these images would not pass any kind of robust standard. Google’s AI generator is not going to go look up how high the river Seine is, and then calculate what it would look like after 75 years of increasing drought conditions. It is just going to find pictures of the river, pictures of droughts and rivers with low water level, and generate an image based on that input. MailOnline’s AI generated images are nothing more than dystopian fantasy straight out a sci fi novel or movie, which have proposed for more than a hundred years, more compellingly and entertainingly, depicting post-apocalyptic worlds.
On a positive note, at the time of my writing this post, there was not a single positive or affirming comment under this post. Comments from around the world seemed to summarize it as “tosh,” so it seems this fearmongering is not having the intended effect. The Daily Mail Online really should consider taking these comments to heart, leave the fantasy to fiction writers, and do their job of reporting on factual news of the day.
