World's Natural Resource Depletion Forecast Graphic

I caught an interesting discussion over on FlowingData about this graphic from New Scientist which is supposed to convey a long term forecast of our natural resources and how long we have till we run out on various elements. Although it looks pretty, it is pretty hard to understand intuitively. The circular graph in the middle is supposed to convey how long till we run out of various elemental natural resources and time is shown on a log scale as you go outward. Although I am a big fan of log scales, it needs to be used appropriately. My guess here is that some of the elements will supposedly run out in thousands of years where many are running out in less than 100 years so that might lead one to think of a log scale. I don't really agree and in this case it just adds to the confusion.

So I figured I would take a stab at trying to create my own graphic of this data to try to make this graph more intuitive. Disclaimer: I don't have the original data for this graph so I am back-calculating and taking data from the graph and entering it in to my own graph. So in playing with the data, I came up with two graphs I like. Here is the first one (click on any of the graphs to enlarge):

This shows the global supply of each in Giga-grams and then shows the supply over time until it is depleted when it hits zero shown on the time scale on the x-axis. I cut off the x-axis at 150 years because there were only three that were beyond that and for those I put the values in text on the chart. So overall, it is busy but there is alot of information on this graph and I think it is way more intuitive. The y-axis which is global supply of each is on a log scale which actually makes sense to me because the abundancy of elements in the earth's crust is actually log-normal. The only problem with this one, is the lines to depletion really should not be linear since the y-axis is log, even if the depletion rate is linear. You could fix the lines but I didn't care to spend more time on it, I still like this way better than the original, and it actually conveys one extra info nugget the first one didn't, the global supply of each.

Here is my 2nd favorite that I created:

The only difference in this graph is that I am expressing global supply as a percentage of the current supply. This deals with the huge differences in abundance for the different elements. And on this graph since the x and y are both linear scales you can read off this and safely use your intuition. You could easily look at this and say, how many years till I run out of half of the supply of gold? or in 35 years, which elements would I have run out of? Quite a few if you believe this study.

Final disclaimer: I don't agree much at all with this forecast. It assumes a constant consumption rate of all these resources which of course is far from true for many reasons: changing uses, improved extraction technology, changes in recycle, and most of all the supply and demand economics of the whole thing which would suggest that as a resource becomes depleted the price would go up which would decrease demand.

Let me know what you think. I realize my graphs don't look nearly as magazine worthy but they are much more information rich and intuitive in my opinion. Which graph do you like best and any improvements you would recommend?