Climate literacy as a foundation for progress in predicting and adapting to the climate of the coming decades

The workshop on predicting the climate of the coming decades, held on January 11-14, 2010, Miami, Florida, addressed different and complementary aspects of the decadal prediction problem. It was found that the challenge of decadal climate prediction is to quantify sources of climate predictability on interannual to decadal time scales and to provide probabilistic regional forecasts with sufficient skill for planning and decision-making purposes. The symposium highlighted that public lands and marine ecosystem managers are responding to climate change with various approaches, the US National Parks Service is one such example. Research on low probability-high impact events, such as hurricanes, has shown that, even when the public has information about weather information, information is misinterpreted.