Pitfalls of coal peak prediction

摘要

Richard Heinberg and David Fridley argue that coal reserves may be exhausted within decades (Nature 468, 367-369; 2010), basing much of their analysis on fits of cumulative coal production to logistic functions in the style of M. King Hubbert, who famously predicted peak oil supply. But this method is problematic - for example, fitting the decline in production of LP records to a logistic curve would incorrectly indicate that vinyl is a limited resource.