A neat article about the (erroneous) idea that a twitching butterfly wing can be shown to unleash a chain of events culminating in a hurricane:

 … a point Lorenz amplified in his 1972 paper, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

In the paper, Lorenz claimed the large effects of tiny atmospheric events pose both a practical problem, by limiting long-term weather forecasts, and a philosophical one, by preventing us from isolating specific causes of later conditions. The "innumerable" interconnections of nature, Lorenz noted, mean a butterfly’s flap could cause a tornado – or, for all we know, could prevent one …

… "It’s impossible for humans to measure everything infinitely accurately," says Robert Devaney, a mathematics professor at Boston University. "And if you’re off at all, the behavior of the solution could be completely off." When small imprecisions matter greatly, the world is radically unpredictable.

Well before this chaos theory notion started to get popularised, Ray Bradbury (of course) gave us the defining idea.

Maybe a little more humility is needed from eg the Climate Change industry?