Don't let your babies grow up to be petroleum engineers

Over at peakoil.com, someone posing as a petroleum engineer made this rather optimistic claim:

ReserveGrowthRulz wrote:

Depletion alone is only a part of the overall dynamics which go into worldwide production rate, without accounting for new discoveries, their sizes and future rates, old fields changing their depletion profile through better technology and reserve growth, new areas opening up to exploration as, say, the Arctic seapack melts and makes more areas available, without including all of these it would seem to me depletion modeling exclusively is kinda like closing your eyes, grabbing an elephant by the tail and trying to describe his size off of what you've got in your hand?

Upon which, I responded:

Using the melting Arctic seapack as a rationalization for anything strikes me as a last gasp attempt at maintaining the status quo.

Cripes, if the seapack starts to melt at rates at which we need to replenish our oil supply we have a whole "boatload" of problems to start worrying about.

To which he countered (apparently showing no sense of irony):

Arctic ice melting opens up areas of exploration that haven't been available before, both practically and economically. The USGS numbers for undiscovered resources for Greenland are a perfect example, they say maybe there is a little, but maybe there is ALOT.

Spending ALOT of time on the internet there, huh? When did the oil companies start hiring these loosers? I guess they made up some new rulz for the flood of cronyist appointments and their offspring.