The Butterfly Tempest Weather Bulletin

Who, exactly, coined that memorable image that claimed that a butterfly, flapping its wings in one part of the world, could affect the weather on the other side of the globe? Edward Lorenz is credited with using this image as the title of talk he gave in 1972 to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. The idea has passed in and out of thousands of minds, but the actual geographic locations seem to vary wildly. In the interests of calming the public, we have attempted to record recent reports of butterfly-induced weather catastrophes. We remind you, though, that even if your locality is not listed here, that is no guarantee that you are safe!

(Naturally, I can't divulge the efforts of a certain secret agency to station a network of undercover butterflies across the globe, exquisitely tuned and interconnected, prepared at any moment to flutter their wings, causing unknown destruction in untold places...)

And it is worth noting that Alan Turing came close to this memorable image in 1950:

The system of the universe as a whole is such that quite small errors in initial conditions can have an overwhelming effect at a later time. The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centimeter at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping.

• "History is often the tale of small moments - chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence - that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly's wings that triggers a hurricane." Scott Anderson, 'Lawrence in Arabia'.
• "It's called the butterfly principle. Which is basically if a bird flaps its wings in Africa it causes an apple to fall, causes a chain reaction of a painting to be made of the apple, somebody looks at the painting, forgets they gotta pick up their mother after church and runs a red light and gets whopped for eighty bucks. All because a bird flaps its wings in Borbuga which is six million miles away." From the movie "All the Real Girls", honest.
• In the context of the Earth's atmosphere, chaos brings us the "butterfly effect", the incredible conclusion that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Portugal now might just lead to the formation of a severe thunderstorm over Moscow in a couple of weeks' time.
  Mark Buchanan,
  "Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen"
• We'll begin where many discussions of chaos do, with the tragic tale of a butterfly from Brazil whose careless flapping has caused more tornadoes in Kansas than all the future sequels to The Wizard of Oz combined.
  Edward Burger, Michael Starbird,
  "Coincidences, Chaos and All That Math Jazz",
  Norton, 2005.
• ...whether a butterfly in Beijing flaps its wings three times or only two can (in principle) alter totally the weather in San Francisco some days hence.
  David Campbell, Gottfried Mayer-Kress,
  "Chaos and Politics: Applications of Nonlinear Dynamics to Socio-Political Issues",
  in: The Impact of Chaos on Science and Society,
  edited by Celso Grebogi and James Yorke,
  United Nations University Press, 1997.
• If a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo, then a month later it may cause a hurricane in Brazil.
  Jack Cohen, Ian Stewart, from the lamentably unreadable "The Collapse of Chaos".
• It is eerie to note, however, that the anonymous poster about Ms Shelley's death had earlier in the year edited the Wikipedia entry about the so-called Butterfly Effect, the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can influence the weather in Florida.
  Noam Cohen, The New York Times, 09 July 2007.
• ...Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist who suggested that a single flap of a seagull's wings could alter the weather forever through a gradual accretion of energy.
  David Carr,
  "Change is Good: An Article That Explains Bookselling",
  The New York Times, Sunday, 18 July 2004
• Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies.
  Stephen Colbert
• Its gracefully interfolded wings remind us of the butterfly that flutters in Venezuela only to cause a typhoon in Taiwan.
  Alexander Dewdney,
  "The Tinkertoy Computer and Other Machinations",
  Freeman, 1993.
• "I was reading in the paper the other day that the beating of a butterfly's wings in a South American jungle can cause a hurricane thousands of miles away," he began.
  Michael Dibdin, in his murder mystery "A Long Finish".
• "It was onced suggested, to illustrate the chaotic and unpredictable way in which natural systems behave, that the beat of a butterfly's wing in China can eventually trigger a hurricane in the Atlantic."
  The Economist, 08 September 2007.
• The notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York...
  James Gleick,
  "Chaos: Making a New Science"
• "A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean."
  "Havana", with Robert Redford and Lena Olin.
• Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT and a pioneer of chaoplexity, called this phenomenon the butterfly effect, because it meant that a butterfly fluttering in Iowa could, in principle, trigger an avalanche of effects culminating in a monsoon in Indonesia.
  John Horgan,
  "The End of Science".
• "I know exactly what he means. He was talking about the butterfly effect."
  "That was a great movie!"
  "One little change has a ripple effect and it affects everything else, like a butterfly floats its wings and Tokyo explodes or there's a tsunami in like somewhere."
  "Hot Tub Time Machine".
• "The shorthand is the Butterfly Effect. A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine."
  Jeff Goldblum, obnoxious scientist in "Jurassic Park".
• "Invisible and inevitable in its effect, like a butterfly that beats its wings in one corner of the globe, and with that single action changes the weather halfway across the world."
  Alice Hoffman,
  "The Ice Queen".
• "These aren't hand-waving hypotheticals used in chaos theory classes, like that damn butterfly in China that's always flapping one wing and thereby causing a Gulf Coast hurricane.
  Ken Jennings,
  "Maphead".
• "The flapping of Amazonian butterflies that leads - famously - to storms in Scotland is the universal image of how a tiny disturbance may cause a great upheaval."
  Steve Jones,
  "Coral".
• "Then, somewhere, a butterfly flapped its wings. A tropical storm damaged the vessel [Cook's ship HMS Resolution] which lost its mast and was forced to go back to Hawaii."
  Steve Jones,
  "Coral".
• Here's how Dudley Smith, president and CEO of the World Association of Management Consulting Firms, described the Butterfly Effect to a ballroom full of consultants at the group's 1996 world conference in Yokohama, Japan: "We are no better at guessing tomorrow's weather than we are at foretelling the millennium...A butterfly in Java waves its wings and, as a result, the weather in Chicago turns nasty."
  Kate Kane,
  "If a Consultant Flaps His Lips in Yokohama...",
  Fast Company.Com, Issue 07, February 1997, Page 46.
• "Somewhere, a butterfly opened its wings."
  Erik Larson,
  "Isaac's Storm"
• "And why is it I have come to think of myself as the proverbial butterfly in Australia, which only has to flap its wings to start an earthquake on the other side of the earth."
  John Le Carre,
  "A Most Wanted Man"
• "A butterfly flapped its wings in a New York luxury hotel suite, and the fate of entire nations is suddenly in play.
  Andrew Leonard, in an article in Salon.com, 18 May 2011, about the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
• In retrospect I marvel at how the problem arose and was resolved. It was as though having that particular file in my system, along with the preexisting program caused the same chaos as a butterfly flapping its wings in Indonesia. The machine's eventual breakdown was the hurricane in Kansas.
  Stephen Levy, "Insanely Great"
• (The butterfly is in the Amazon and the storm is in Chicago.)
  Roger Lewin,
  "Complexity: Life at the edge of Chaos"
• A butterfly in the Amazon forest flaps its wings and provokes a tornado in Texas.
  Penelope Lively, 'How it all Began'
• Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?
  Edward Lorenz
• You think God looks out for people? said Rawlins.
  Yeah. I guess He does. You?
  Yeah. I do. Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you're done there's wars and ruination and all hell.
  Cormac McCarthy, "All the Pretty Horses".
• In other cases what seemed like an unremarkable bit of butterfly wing-flapping in the West set off a tsunami in distant lands.
  Mark Oppenheimer, reviewing "The Tenth Parallel" in the New York Times, 18 August 2010.
• The sensitive dependence of nonlinear systems on their initial conditions has been called the Butterfly Effect, from the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in China, say, might spell the difference several months later between a hurricane and a balmy day along the eastern US seaboard.
  John Paulos,
  "A Mathematician Looks at the Newspaper".
• All this shit's related. You've heard of chaos theory? A butterfly flaps its wings in South America and that causes a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.
  Richard Russo,
  "Everybody's Fool".
• A butterfly flutters its wings somewhere and starts up an irreversible and unpredictable process.
  Pernille Rygg,
  "The Butterfly Effect",
  1995.
• Much as the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Montana might have caused a monsoon in India, Erdos's little conjecture might have altered the fate of Western civilization.
  Bruce Schecter,
  "My Brain is Open: the Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos",
  1998.
• In the extreme, consider the "butterfly effect" that describes chaos theory as applied to weather forecasting; a butterfly flapping its wings in California ultimately has a long-term effect on the weather in Beijing.
  Addison Snell,
  Shared Memory: Standards Scale Up with SGI Altix UV,
  May, 2010.
• The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen does.
  Ian Stewart,
  "Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos"
• When a butterfly in Tokyo flaps its wings, the result may be a hurricane in Florida a month later.
  Ian Stewart,
  "Nature's Numbers"
• "Our differing approaches have led to a few animated discussions (to say the least) and it was after one of these that I started to think about chaos theory: the mathematical theory behind the parable of the butterfly and the storm that gives rise to the so-called butterfly effect - the idea that the flap of the wing of a butterfly in the Amazon can set off the atmospheric events that lead to a storm off the coast of Texas weeks later. David Sumpter, The Guardian, 27 August 2023.
• This phenomenon is often called the "butterfly effect", wherein a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can produce a thunderstorm in Florida...the same butterfly could calm a hurricane in Texas simply by flapping its wings in a certain fashion.
  George Szipiro,
  "Kepler's Conjecture".
• For example, it is the basis for the so-called butterfly effect, which states that small causes can lead to great consequences: A butterfly flapping its wings in Texas could provoke a thunderstorm in Australia.
  George Szipiro,
  "Poincare's Prize".
• This became known as the butterfly effect, since a butterfly moving its wings in India could cause a hurricane in New York, two years later.
  Nassim Taleb, "The Black Swan".
• The equations that governed the flow of wind and moisture looked simple enough, for example - until researchers realized that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Texas could change the course of a hurricane in Haiti a week later. Or that a flap of that butterfly's wings a millimeter to the left might have deflected the hurricane in a totally different direction.
  Mitchell Waldrop,
  "Complexity""
• Due to nonlinearities in weather processes, a butterfly flapping its wings in Tahiti can, in theory, produce a tornado in Kansas.
  Eric Weisstein, editor,
  CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics,
  "Butterfly Effect"
• "Could a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?"
  Ernest Zebrowski, "Perils of a Restless Planet"
• It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wings can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world. - Chaos Theory
  an opening quote in the movie "The Butterfly Effect"
• "Chaos theory states that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Grosse Pointe, it will eventually cause a hurricane in Hawaii."
  "I've heard that."
  "Well imagine what would happen in Hawaii if the two of us hooked up!"
  The teen soap opera spoof "Grosse Pointe".
• "Don't they say the beating of a butterfly's wings over the Atlantic can cause a hurricane in the Pacific?"
  "Happenstance", French title "Le battement d'ailes du papillon" ("The beating of the wings of a butterfly").
• Brian: "You ever hear of the theory that if you kill a butterfly in the past it can drastically alter the future? Well who knows what else we changed?"
  Announcer: "Tonight on the Tonight Show, movie star George Clooney."
  Peter: "Oh, he's good."
  Announcer: "Comedian Dave Chappelle."
  Brian: "He's funny, like him."
  Announcer: "And musician Harry Connick Jr."
  Peter: "Wow, what a show."
  Announcer: "And now, ladies and gentleman, heeeeeeeeeere's Chevy!"
  Peter: "Oh god Brian, we messed up bad! We messed up real bad!"
  "The Family Guy"
• It's the butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico and causing a hurricane in China.
  Hannah Fry, "Why Weather Forecasting Keeps Getting Better", The New Yorker, 24 June 2019.
• In a parenthetical buried in his new memoir, Graydon Carter recounts the story of how his 1984 GQ cover story of Donald Trump - which sold well on newsstands - convinced Conde Nast owner Si Newhouse to publish The Art of the Deal. That book led to The Apprentice, which led to the second half of Trump's career as media personality and then president. "As they say, a butterfly's wings," Carter writes.
  Politico, 06 April 2025.
• Scientists have discovered that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it can set off a tornado in Texas. At this very moment, a scientific SWAT team is on its way to Brazil to hunt down and destroy this monster."
  Flox News Channel.