{"slug": "john-platt-google-ai-for-climate-and-science", "title": "John Platt (Google): AI for Climate and Science", "summary": "Google Research's Applied Science team, led by Google Fellow John Platt, cut contrail formation by 62% with almost no extra fuel in trials with American Airlines by detecting contrails from weather satellites and predicting where they will form, Platt said in a podcast interview. Platt said contrails account for roughly 1% of human-caused warming and that a small share of flights creates most of that warming. Platt also described ERA, Google's empirical research assistant, and FireSat, a satellite constellation of about 50 satellites at full scale designed to catch wildfires while they are still small enough to put out.", "body_md": "John Platt is a Google Fellow and leads the Applied Science team at Google Research, the group working on climate and science. He's also the person behind SMO and Platt scaling. In this episode, we talk with him about how Google decides which scientific problems are worth its time, and what happens when AI meets real physical systems. A big part of the conversation is contrails. A small share of flights creates most of the warming from contrails, which together add up to roughly 1% of human-caused warming. John explains how his team detects contrails from weather satellites and predicts where they will form. In trials with American Airlines, rerouting flights cut contrail formation by 62% with almost no extra fuel. We also get into ERA, Google's empirical research assistant, and where AI agents actually help scientists. John sees them taking over the drudgery of building models and munging data, while humans keep the taste and the rigor. He shares why he's skeptical of gradient-free optimization, why the bitter lesson runs into energy and data center limits, and why physical AI that makes manufacturing cheaper could matter a lot for climate. We finish with FireSat, a satellite constellation (about 50 satellites at full scale) designed to catch wildfires while they're still small enough to put out.\n\nTimeline\n\n00:00 Intro\n\n01:09 How Google picks science problems: comparative advantage\n\n04:15 Projects that didn't work: RNA aptamers and tool/problem fit\n\n05:46 DNA, RNA and XNA\n\n07:41 Contrails and why they warm the planet\n\n13:01 Three AI systems for avoiding contrails\n\n15:23 Cloud seeding and why cloud physics is hard\n\n18:17 Airline trials: 62% fewer contrails\n\n19:46 Navier-Stokes, wind tunnels and where simulation still fails\n\n25:07 Will agents replace scientists? ERA and scorable tasks\n\n31:36 Overfitting, Kaggle and the half-pixel bug\n\n33:41 Agents that exploit bugs: Lean and Goodhart's law\n\n36:45 Gradient-free optimization\n\n38:53 SMO, SVMs and hinge loss in neural networks\n\n42:12 The bitter lesson and the limits of scaling\n\n43:36 Where agents will help science in the next 12 months\n\n45:13 Robotics and making climate tech cheaper to build\n\n48:22 AI risk and misuse\n\n50:51 Climate outlook: past 2°C\n\n54:39 Why AI won't just solve climate change\n\n57:04 Room-temperature superconductors, fusion and HVDC\n\n1:02:25 FireSat: detecting wildfires from orbit\n\n1:05:16 Why existing satellites aren't enough\n\n1:07:53 The economics of 50 satellites\n\n1:09:34 False positives\n\n1:11:16 Closing\n\nTopics\n\n**Music**\n\n- \"Kid Kodi\" - Blue Dot Sessions - via Free Music Archive - CC BY-NC 4.0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/john-platt-google-ai-for-climate-and-science", "canonical_source": "https://api.riverside.fm/hosting/VGaMOITx.rss", "published_at": "2026-10-10 03:01:41+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-16 07:38:34.678079+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-research", "ai-agents", "ai-safety"], "entities": ["Google", "Google Research", "John Platt", "American Airlines", "ERA", "FireSat", "SMO", "Platt scaling"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/john-platt-google-ai-for-climate-and-science", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/john-platt-google-ai-for-climate-and-science.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/john-platt-google-ai-for-climate-and-science.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/john-platt-google-ai-for-climate-and-science.jsonld"}}