The Oil Drum

I get upset over that kind of predictions (and the inevitable breathless media coverage) because they're meaningless.  As I said above, you simply can't predict the prices caused by those hugely disruptive events, and tossing around specific numbers is wildly misleading.  If one or more of those things were to happen, the actual price level could be much higher or not nearly as high as they're predicting, thanks to factors their model can't take into account.

When I was in economics graduate school, I had a professor who liked to say some times you can make up a totally convincing, precise argument based on econometrics that's laughably wrong.

I'm an economist by training and I have great respect for people who work with statistics and economic modeling; whether they're explaining relationships between factors in the past or trying to predict the future, they provide a very useful service.  But I also think that one of the main things we all should keep in mind is the limits of such analysis, and how incredibly easy it is to step over the line from reasonable conclusion into utter gibberish without even realizing it.