What do we do with forecasts of the future?

[Noam Ross]

Via Garry Peterson I discovered this post by Simon Donner about forecasts of this year's massive coral bleaching event in the Carribbean.

Donner and colleagues published a paper in PNAS in 2007 in which they calculated that heat waves that cause massive coral bleaching, like a previous event in 2005, had gone from being 1-in-1000-year events to a probability of once every 10-50 years during the 1990s, and by the 2030s will occur every 1-2 years. This year's event, says Donner, is another fingerprint of human-driven climate change:

Keep in mind the predictions. This is what the scientific community predicted was likely to happen. An event which we calculated would be a once in a millennium occurrence without human impact on the climate, happened again five years later....

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