We have been similarly unsuccessful in using global models to predict yet another complex and turbulent system-namely, the weather. We are not much better at making predictions than we were twenty or thirty years ago. Specific, localized aberrations or rogue events (what chaos theorists call “the butterfly effect”) that can neither be predicted nor adequately described apparently have a major influence on the weather that occurs in other, remote parts of the world. In North America we have seen the influence of El NinÒ‡o (a small body of water off the western Central America coast), much as we recently witnessed the impact which conflicts in very small countries (Kuwait, Kosovo) or a sexual misadventure (the Monica scandal) has had on the entire world community.
