Critical slowing-down: Indicator of extreme events?

There is always a special interest in trying to predict transitions, crisis, social revolutions, catastrophic events like the end of the world and, nowadays judging by the number of spam messages coming from clairvoyants, we strongly believe that the interest in predicting events of every type is growing fast. Almost always catastrophic events are produced when a bifurcation occurs in a dynamical system. Examples in optics can be the laser threshold, bistability, optical rogue waves, instabilities in lasers with injected signal, and many other drastic changes in the behavior of a system.