Butterfly effects

Palmer replies: While plausible, of course, the model of Roger Pielke, Bo-Wen Shen, and Xubin Zeng is nevertheless heuristic: As mentioned in my article, no rigorous proof or disproof of the real butterfly effect exists. Indeed, in contrast with the paper by Pielke and his coauthors, ¹ recent published work ² on spontaneous stochasticity in high Reynolds number flows (see reference 7 in my article ) suggests that not only may macroscopic circulations be sensitive to flaps of butterflies’ wings in finite time, but they may also be sensitive to the motions of individual molecules.