But weather is different. Lorenz’s tiny “rounding error” existed in a more interdependent and volatile environment than the void through which Halley’s Comet orbits. Tiny eddies of air can be influenced by an almost immeasurably small event—something like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings—and these eddies can affect larger currents, which in turn alter the way cold and warm fronts build—a chain of events that can magnify the initial disturbance exponentially, thereby completely undermining attempts to make reliable predictions. Lorenz’s program had been correct. When, several years later,
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