Forecasters take care to avoid truck with facts IT seems that 2013 was destined to become a year of untrammelled hyperbole, fallible soothsaying and poor judgment of an unprecedented kind. And so it came to pass. Month by month. January. The new year commences with a certain foreboding. Revellers are aware of a Boxing Day warning by professor Hugh White, as told to readers of The Age, that they should not be "too surprised if the US and Japan go to war with China."