The Butterfly Effect is a woefully widely misunderstood idea. What it actually refers to is a model of an atmosphere that atomises the world down into (say) ten centimeter resolution, with things like pressure, windspeed, etc modelled at each point. Even if your initial capture of the data was perfect your ten centimeter resolution could miss a butterfly in Beijing, and when it flaps its wings it'll (slightly) affect the air pressure of the four data points around it. Then these affect the data points adjacent to them, and so on. The model will work fine for a while, but eventually the tiny error in initial conditions will force a major error.

The Butterfly Effect is about the sensitivity of models to initial conditions. It's the reason why we can forecast the weather very accurately in the short term, but only in very vague terms over the long term. This is entirely due to the model being inadequate compared to reality. As all models are by definition. That doesn't mean that models can't be accurate enough to be useful. You just have to be aware of their limitations.

Posted By: SeretThe Butterfly Effect is about the sensitivity of models to initial conditions

Maybe that's what is understood by 'butterfly effect'. But that's not all there is to it - never mind models, much more significantly, look at the real thing:

Chaos Theory is about the sensitivity of real-life systems to initial conditions.

Except that in real-life systems, there's no such thing as 'initial conditions', except the series of things that the system did previously, and before that, and before that ...

Yeah but to guard against using inadequate data as an excuse to achieve comforting or self-deceiving results. Knowing where the data deficiencies are, you can estimate 'realistic' fudge factors to compensate, while acquiring better information. That's what IPCC is doing all the time. Why isn't an IPHS (Intergovernmental Panel on Human Sustainability) of equivalent status hard at work now?

Going to get into Lyapunov exponent and logistic maps soon. Scary stuff.

The Audi e-gas plant will produce about 1,000 metric tons of e-gas per year, chemically binding some 2,800 metric tons of CO2. This roughly corresponds to the amount that a forest of over 220,000 beech trees absorbs in one year. Water and oxygen are the only by-products.

Audi built the e-gas plant in collaboration with the plant construction specialist ETOGAS GmbH (formerly SolarFuel) and its project partner MT-BioMethan GmbH on a 4,100 m2 (44,132.03 sq ft) plot of land owned by EWE AG. Ground was broken in September 2012, and the topping-out ceremony was celebrated in December. The efficient use of energy flows is the top priority in the production sequence of the plant. The waste heat given off during methanation is used as process energy in the adjacent biogas plant, significantly increasing overall efficiency. In return, this plant supplies the highly concentrated CO2 required as a basic building block for the e-gas. This CO2 thus serves as a raw material and is not emitted to the atmosphere.


It seems that there is also a project to utilize Microoganisms as well
The e-gas project is part of Audi's comprehensive e-fuels strategy. In parallel with the e-gas plant in Werlte, Audi also operates a research facility in Hobbs, New Mexico, USA, for the production of e-ethanol and e-diesel in collaboration with Joule. At this facility, microorganisms use water (brackish, salt or wastewater) sunlight and carbon dioxide to produce high-purity fuels. The strategic goal of these projects is to use CO2 as a raw material for fuels and thus improve the overall footprint substantially. The e-fuels strategy is an important pillar of Audi's sustainability initiative.

full article
http://green.autoblog.com/2013/07/08/audi-opens-renewable-energy-e-gas-plant-in-germany/