The climate system on Earth is subject to the butterfly effect, but we frequently have good-enough predictions, e.g. the stuff airline pilots rely on.

When confronted with complexity, throwing up hands is not the correct response.

Things can be imprecise, and can be modeled as such. Things can be chaotic, and can be modeled as such. Technologists tend to think in a binary between things that can be represented by a single number and those that can't, but that doesn't reflect reality but rather the common (limited) tools of our trade. Sometimes you've got to do a dot product of some distributions for possible values of future vectors, and you get a vague -- but still very real -- answer.