The man who chased the Indian monsoon

Jagadish Shukla, who was part of the team that won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for work on human-induced climate change, chronicles his work, in A Billion Butterflies

- Syed Saad Ahmed

The butterfly effect or chaos theory isa concept ingrained in popular culture more than six decades after the scientist Edward Lorenz proposed it.

The term is thought to have originated at a lecture titled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings Set Off a Tornado in Brazil? Interestingly, Lorenz used the image of a seagull in his presentation, which another scientist mistook for a butterfly, resulting in the name we are familiar with today.

In the 1960s, Lorenz tried to determine if it was possible to model future atmospheric conditions using past data. He realised that rounding off just one variable in the model, from .506127 to .506, radically altered the results. His simulations suggested that the minutest changes in initial atmospheric conditions (due to a butterfly flapping its wings, for instance) could distort the results of forecasting models, making long-term weather predictions impossible.

And yet, today, scientists can predict not just the weather but a range of climatic events with reliable certainty. Whether it is the timing and intensity of the Indian monsoons or the El Nifio (a global climate phenomenon that leads to droughts in some regions and heavy rainfall in others), we anticipate and prepare for them. One of the scientists responsible for these breakthroughs is Jagadish Shukla.