The Oil Drum: The Coal Question and Climate Change

At The Oil Drum, there has been much discussion of the modeling of future oil production and the reliability of reserve data. It is also understood that burning fossil hydrocarbon fuels increases the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, and that this is likely to affect our climate. What about coal? Can we figure out how much coal is likely to be produced, and how quickly the coal reserves will be exhausted? How reliable are coal reserve numbers? What can our models for coal and hydrocarbon production tell us about atmospheric CO2 concentrations? About climate? It turns out that we can give answers to all of these questions, using the same Hubbert linearizations and normal curve fits that we use for oil.
Much more after the jump to The Oil Drum.