How Useful Is Artificial (so-called) Intelligence"?

 We just asked Chat GPT a question about forests and climate.

Specifically, we asked:

If all the world's forests burned, what effect would that have on global temperature?

Here's the answer we got:

Estimation of the Increase in CO₂:

Let’s assume that about 50% of the biomass carbon is released during a global forest fire:

• If global forests contain around 650 billion tons of carbon, then:
  • 50% of that (325 billion tons) would be released into the atmosphere.
• This would increase atmospheric CO₂ by 325 billion tons (or 325,000 million tons).

[Hey, wait a minute. 325 billion tons of carbon do not equate to 325 billion tons of CO₂.  The atomic weight of carbon is 12, the molecular mass of CO₂ is 44. So already CHAT GTP is out by a factor of 3.67]

Next:

Given that the atmosphere currently holds around 3,170 billion tons of CO₂, this would increase the total atmospheric CO₂ by about 10%.

[So, taking account of the above noted 3.67-fold error in estimating the amount of CO₂ that would be released on burning all the forests, it is evident that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration would increase not by 10% to around 460-480 ppm, but by 37% to 582 parts per million.]

So much for this so-called artificial intelligence that consumes so much electricity that it requires a nuclear power plant to operate. For now, we should regard such supposed intelligence with considerable scepticism while doing the best we can with the mere eighty or ninety billion neurons with their quadrillion or so interconnections that each of us is blessed with.

Checking the potential of AI further, we asked Gemini the same question we'd asked Chat GPT and got a more vague response -- but at least it made sense. Moreover, Gemini mentioned the negative impact of deforestation on global temperature through its effect on the amount of solar radiation reflected to outer space. Trees have a climate warming effect due to their high efficiency in absorbing solar radiation, up to 95% in the case of coniferous forests, whereas grassland, for example, absorbs only 80 to 85% of incoming solar radiation, the balance being reflected to outer space.