Wave Goodbye to the Butterfly Effect …

by M. Jonas, Aug 18, 2026 in WUWT

… and wave as hard as you like. There’s no need to worry about disrupting Earth’s climate.

It has been a long time coming, but I have had another paper on Climate Modelling published – Chaos Theory is Void. It addresses the well-known and generally-accepted Butterfly Effect, aka Chaos Theory. I and others have felt for a long time that the Butterfly Effect exists only in models, and that Earth’s self-correcting weather/climate is too stable for the Butterfly Effect to exist to any meaningful extent in the real world. But how to prove that?

Two years ago, in GCMs Cannot Predict Climate, I described how GCMs (General Circulation Models) cannot predict climate because their iterative mechanism fails after a few weeks. Clearly the iterative mechanism itself is the problem. But how to prove that?

It all stayed on the back-burner for a while, but then I came across a paper that criticised an AI-based model for not being able to replicate the Butterfly Effect. In my previous paper I had argued that the structure of GCMs was upside-down: instead of working bottom-up from weather to climate, a climate model should work top-down with climate. Now, here was AI doing exactly what I argued for and being criticised for not having the same problem as GCMs!