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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Lessons from weather forecasting and its history for forecasting as a domain - Less Wrong
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People always mention the Butterfly Effect as if it is an unmitigated disaster for humans: it's kind of like Nature saying FU, you are never going to be able to predict me.
And it's true that the Butterfly Effect makes it very hard to make good predictions about the weather. But it also has an upside, because it means if we somehow do figure out how to make good predictions, than we should also be able to easily control the weather. If a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo can cause a tornado in Kansas, and we know this, then we should be able to prevent the tornado in Kansas by having another butterfly flap its wings in Osaka (or whatever).
The problem is that the weather also has many variables. While the chaos implies control principal works for low dimensional chaotic systems, e.g., the three body problem in orbital dynamics, I'm not sure how well it would work for weather.
IIRC for a genuinely chaotic system, long-term predictions diverge for any error in the starting measurements, no matter how small. So if weather behaviour is really chaotic then precisely predicting it in the long-term isn't physically possible.
Unless you start controlling the weather...,