Abstract
If you could somehow ask a North Atlantic right whale what she thinks the future holds, what would she say? Right whales must, in some way, think about the future in order to make survival decisions. As an ocean science community, our eyes are trained increasingly on the future as well. The twin global environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss have elevated the science of real-world prediction to one of urgent interest. At timescales ranging from hours to decades, society is asking ocean science for actionable predictions, projections, and forecasts, with the hope of mitigating and adapting to the changing ocean. Meeting this challenge requires more than the ability to predict ocean dynamics.