Coupled with all the urgent demands for wide-ranging policy changes based on those predictions, the whole issue is frightening and seriously damages the name of science, IMO.
TChris, that's still essentially a weather prediction, not a climate prediction. Take a look at the link I posted in #27. Given a liberal margin-of-error, I could easily predict the average temperature for any state one month in advance; I just look at what the average temperature IS for that state and that month. (That, in essence, is climate. Climate = average weather.)
If you want to try something interesting, go to CLIMVIS and plot temperatures for any given month using airport weather data. Try plotting data for April in a mid-latitude state, like Pennsylvania or Kentucky, over a lot of years. Comparing the graphs will show that there is usually a fairly strong transition from cold to warm in April, but the timing of this transition is considerably different year-to-year. March would work too; remember the "in like a lamb, out like a lion" (or vice versa) adage? The average temperature for a transitional month is going to be based on a combination of the cold part of the month and the warm part of the month. So while there's going to be considerable variability -- due to weather -- the average temperature is still going to be about (tossing out a number not based on anything) 52 degrees.
If you want to know the average annual temperature of a given area, find a cave in the area. The constant temperature of the cave is the average temperature of the area. This is also why borehole temperature logs, properly analyzed, can provide information about recent past climate-based temperature trends.