Weather and climate

About 15 years ago Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect entered into the public consciousness. The crux of it to me was the idea behind sensitive dependence, how a small change in one part of the system can cause a large change in another. One of the stories told was that the flutter of a butterfly wing in europe could trigger a hurricane in the US Gulf.

These ideas entered my head again at a climate modelling talk this week. Modelling climate is about creating heuristics that realistic describe the climate in the past and so can then be used to extrapolate to climate in the future.

Climate is the net result of many weather systems interacting. Cloud cover, ocean currents, gaseous sulphates and so on. Hundreds of parameters producing billions of possibilities producing these kinds of graphs.