Al Gore and the Butterfly Effect

The term “butterfly effect” is related to the work of Edward Lorenz and grounded in chaos theory and the sensitive dependency in initial conditions, described for the first time in the literature of Jacques Hadamard in 1890 and popularized by the book written in 1906 by Pierre Duhem.

The essential idea is that a butterfly could eventually have an effect of great significance in subsequent historical events. This seems to have appeared for the first time in a short story from 1952 by Ray Bradbury about time travel. Lorenz was, however, the one to make the term popular.

In 1961, Lorenz was using a numerical model on a computer to create a prediction of meteorological conditions, when, as a shortcut to a number in the sequence, he wrote the decimal number 0.506 instead of typing the complete number (0.506127) so that computer could accept it. The result was a completely different event. Lorenz published his findings in his 1963 work for New York Academy of Sciences noting, “One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull’s wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.” In later discourse, Lorenz used the more poetic description “butterfly.”

When Lorenz was incapable of providing a title for a talk he had to give at the 139th reunion of the United States Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, Philip Merrilees suggested, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” to use as the talk’s title. This seemed fitting because meteorologists and other scientists studying climate know that it is practically impossible to predict local meteorological conditions, especially for a tiny place on the surface of the earth over a period of 72 hours, and scientists never dream of trying to do so with the whole planet, even with the assistance of today’s supercomputers, because the number of climate factors is astronomical.

But Al Gore and the politicians of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) have been terrifying the world for many years, offering forecasts for world climate 100 or more years into the future. They base their predictions on limited data of weather variables from several centuries ago.

It should not be a surprise that hurricane season has shown us none of the catastrophic events caused by “global warming” or “greenhouse gases” predicted by Al Gore and the UN IPCC.

Simply put, these irresponsible politicians, Al Gore and the others at the IPCC, have been trapped by Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect.