I still claim that nothing prevents us from nailing a good macro understanding using nothing more than an expected value for a typical reserve growth model or creaming curve. I assert that the two curves basically amount to the same thing; in particular when we apply the numbers in a statistically valid way to the oil shock model, either one fits nicely into the maturation phase.-Mobjectivist.

Stochastic Resonance asserts itself as "thermostats", feedback
loops fail iniating cascade.

Using an ocean-atmosphere climate model we demonstrate that stochastic resonance could be an important
mechanism for millennial-scale climate variability during glacial times. We propose that the
glacial ocean circulation, unlike today's, was an excitable system with a stable and a weakly unstable
mode of operation, and that a combination of weak periodic forcing and plausible-amplitude stochastic
fluctuations of the freshwater flux into the northern North Atlantic can produce glacial warm events similar
in time evolution, amplitude, spatial pattern, and interspike intervals to those found in the observed climate records.

www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/ Publications/Journals/stochres.pdf

The first major US city to collapse, New Orleans, is evidence of how this works.

As a Self Organizing Critical(SOC), System the mechanism for
abrupt change in oil production would be identical.

...stochastic resonance (SR) has become very popular in many fields of natural science as a paradigm which epitomizes noise-controlled onset of order in a complex system.
Although in the recent literature the notion of SR gained broader significance, the archetype of SR models is represented by a simple symmetric bistable process x(t) driven by both an additive random noise, for simplicity, white and gaussian, and an external sinusoidal bias. On keeping the forcing amplitude and frequency fixed, the amplitude of the periodic component of the process, x, grows sharply with the noise intensity until it reaches a maximum and, then, decreases slowly according to a certain power-law.
It was initially suggested that such a behavior results from the attuning of a deterministic with a stochastic time scale, that is, the forcing period To and the switching time T(D) of the un-biased bistable process x(t), respectively.

It has been said here on TOD that estimates of World Oil Production are fuzzy.

But as usage of oil increases to max levels, exactness becomes critical.
Just when we need it, we don't have it.

In other words, we'll know exactly how much oil we're pumping only when our most critical function sucks air or our least critical function fails and cascades.

James