Chaos incarnate

 

Climate change is pushing hurricanes to their extremes. In 2018, Hurricane Michael (shown here in this digitally enhanced image) became the first Category 5 hurricane to make landfall on the Florida Panhandle. (Image credit: Roberto Machado Noa/Getty Images)

The butterfly effect,  an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (meaning that there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions).[3] A metaphor for this behavior is that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.[4]

Chaos is baked into reality due to the fact everything's connected. It's all about initial conditions, entanglement and feedback loops, crucial characteristics of all things related to weather.

A plot of the Lorenz attractor for values r = 28, σ = 10, b = 8/3 aka the Butterfly Effect

Humans aren't just making Earth warmer, they are making the climate chaotic, a stark new study suggests.

The new research, which was posted April 21 to the preprint database arXiv(opens in new tab), draws a broad and general picture of the full potential impact of human activity on the climate. And the picture isn't pretty. 

While the study doesn't present a complete simulation of a climate model, it does paint a broad sketch of where we're heading if we don't curtail climate change and our unchecked use of fossil fuels, according to the study authors, scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Porto in Portugal. . 

"The implications of climate change are well known (droughts, heat waves, extreme phenomena, etc)," study researcher Orfeu Bertolami told Live Science in an email. "If the Earth System gets into the region of chaotic behavior, we will lose all hope of somehow fixing the problem."

Six iterations of a set of states {\displaystyle [x,y]}[x,y] passed through the logistic map. The first iterate (blue) is the initial condition, which essentially forms a circle. Animation shows the first to the sixth iteration of the circular initial conditions. It can be seen that mixing occurs as we progress in iterations. The sixth iteration shows that the points are almost completely scattered in the phase space. Had we progressed further in iterations, the mixing would have been homogeneous and irreversible. 

We have been warned.