Chaos Theory, the Weather and Earthquakes

Why is the weather so difficult to predict? More times than not, we get it wrong.

Not long ago meteorologists predicted snow for us Orange Countians, but no snow came. Then there's the havoc wreaked by natural disasters. 

If we could better predict earthquakes and tsunamis, we'd save more lives than by constructing tougher buildings.

Although weather and plate shifts are complicated, one word can help understand them: chaos. That may seem like it explains nothing, but there’s your run-of-the-mill chaos, and then there’s your chaos that comes out of chaos theory. Let's talk about the latter.

The funny thing about chaos, from a scientific perspective at least, is that it’s actually not chaotic. It just appears that way to us. To put it very simply, chaos says that when things appear chaotic, like the weather, they are actually following a very deep pattern that is influenced by a bewildering number of variables.

This is where we get the now famous idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan can cause a tornado in Oklahoma. There are just so, so many influences on the weather that it’s not possible to predict what will happen from one day to the next, because we can’t know exactly everything that's going on today.

And geological processes are no better. They are shaped over millions and millions of years, and even though they seem to progress slowly from our perspective, there are so many pieces in play that the most powerful computers in the world can't account for all the data.

So try not to get too excited about weather predictions or early-warning systems. After all, there’s an entire branch of science that explains why nobody can predict what happens next.