As Americans faced this uncertain future, public debate sprang up over the accuracy and value of predictions, asking whether it was possible to look into the future with any degree of certainty.
It must be stressed that it is extremely difficult to predict state pension reforms in the future with any degree of certainty.
Milo Sjardin, head of Bloomberg New Energy Finance's Asia arm, says China's stable government allows for a level of future certainty that makes massive, systemic transitions manageable and politically relevant - a key difference with the more chaotic US system.
Different communities, whose interpretations of and costs of resource protection may acutely reflect their own unique cultural values, incomes, or beliefs in the future, can evaluate feasible engineering/water resource protection strategies even in the absence of certainty about future climate conditions.
But the lack of certainty about future plans is the loudest complaint about the chancellor coming from businesses.
Voters would be given real choices about how much they wanted to invest in health care, revenues would grow with the economy and there would be a reasonable degree of certainty about future funding.
Before the referendum, many farmers told the Guardian they preferred to be outside the EU despite the lack of certainty on future subsidies, because they disliked EU regulations or were confident the UK could compete independently with other countries.
What matters about climate change is not whether we can predict the future with some desired level of certainty and accuracy; it is whether we have sufficient foresight, supported by wisdom, to allow our perspective about the future, and our responsibility for it, to be altered.
It's difficult for firms to plan for the future, to have some sort of certainty and some sort of steady programme for work is much better for the industry, and much better from the island as well.
A note in the accounts says it has not prepared a new corporate plan as there is "currently no minister and lack of certainty on future resource allocations from the NI Executive". Passenger numbers across Translink's bus and rail services rose by just under 2% over the year to 79.9m.
