Scholars' awards go mainly to men

Pitfalls of coal peak predictionRichard 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 problematicfor example, fitting the decline in production of LP records to a logistic curve would incorrectly indicate that vinyl is a limited resource.If scarcity were an important determinant of US coalproduction history, prices should have increased.Yet they have stayed around US$34 per tonne for the past 50 years, irrespective of production trends.Alternative explanations could include changes in electricity demand and market structure.There would then be no justification for calculating the limit of coal resources from a logistic graph of