Video Of The Week: Albert Wenger On What Is Next

My partner Albert gave a talk at the Gel conference last month on how to think about what is coming next.

It’s about 22mins. Here it is:

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. LIAD

    Masterclass on conviction driven investing by Albert.Look at the moon. Not the finger pointing to it.Framework as I see it.Establish first principles. Build up a thesis. Project the future. Seek those creating it. Help them do so.

    1. awaldstein

      Love this comment.So interesting that one of my favorite photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson approached art just the opposite.They would send him out to shoot a puppet theatre in Paris and he would come back with pictures of children’s faces.Lots of things that drive me as a marketer see the world of behavioral drives through Bresson’s eyes.

      1. Martha Murray

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    2. Amar

      A great framework for entrepreneurship / product management as well:- establish first principles – build up a thesis- project the future- the product- identify those wanting to get to the future (market size)- help them get there (sell) (PMF)

    3. Susan Rubinsky

      Shorten to haiku and I’m sold!

      1. Sam

        Have first principles.Seek those building your world view.Help accelerate.

  2. pointsnfigures

    Interesting talk. I believe that there were markets in tribes. Read “Economics of a POW Camp”. https://www.jstor.org/stabl…I am going to try and wrap my head around zero marginal costs. If there is no direct cost, there is always an opportunity cost. Sometimes hard to quantify it though.This hits a lot of different levels. I think that the “elites” of today are really rubbing up against the internet. Brexit, rise of Trump are two examples. The recent NY State assault on Airbnb, Austin TX on Uber/Lyft, and the debate in Chicago over both are another example.With regard to climate change, current solutions are all about wealth transfer-not solutions. If we don’t utilize nuclear power, we aren’t thinking critically about the problem.

    1. SubstrateUndertow

      Isn’t wealth-transfer just a derogatory term that the incumbent oligarchic winners use to justify their continued top-down economic dominance ?They may well be sincere it their rationalized economic status-quo visualizations and its associative self-serving language framing but in the larger arch of social/economic evolutionary progress would’t a more realistic visualization framing-term be equitable-wealth-realinment.It seems to me the unstoppable/inevitability long-term historical trajectory of the distributive-network-effect is to inherently unleashed a bottom-up cultural-sea-change that organically realigns the fundamental distribution of wealth, power, education and control.The biologic distributive organizational-imperative(strange-attractor) is now bubbling up into human organizational-culture via its network-effect analogue.

      1. pointsnfigures

        No, it’s wealth transfer. Redistributing money from America to other countries in the name of science-which will not “trickle down” to the people in those countries that need it most. It’s a straight tax.For some science based commentary that is different than what most people probably read on climate, see this blog: https://wattsupwiththat.com

    2. LE

      If there is no direct cost, there is always an opportunity cost.Along those lines I always think of the things that people and policy makers waste time on that are 100 years from now issues (when we will be dead) when in your city (as only one example) there are some really serious problems that need fixing that are created by poverty, drugs, single moms and of course gun violence. Now. Or our vulnerable electric grid or our crumbling infrastructure.

  3. William Mougayar

    “It’s not the technology, it’s what the technology enables us to do.”And beyond that, I liked the part about the various freedoms we should have.

  4. Patrick McKenna

    Great talk. Albert’s three freedoms (1.Economic, 2.Informational, 3.Psychological). Slight twist – I propose reordering the implied hierarchy to begin with Psychological Freedom. Many people already posses Economic and Informational Freedom but remain trapped and miserable. The Hack – strive for Psychological Freedom directly

    1. SubstrateUndertow

      But maybe most of the 1% that already have substantial access to 1.Economic and 2.Informational freedom are forced under present conditions to reinvest most of their attention/psychological-freedom into keeping everyone else’s hand of their $stack by spending most of their attention budget on reinvestment strategies that can maintain there 1% status advantage ?The concentration of wealthy is not so much immoral as it is unsustainable, in the long run, due to its inevitable constraining-distortion on the possible economic scope of imagined reinvestment, only investments that amplify the incumbent winners economic status quo need apply. This seems true even for cloud based network-effect businesses built atop the very medium that makes bottom-up distributive organization governance and control possible for the first time in human history. As McLuhan points out the content of the new (economic)medium is the old (economic)medium at least in the initial phase.Not an attack on the 1% here, just pointing out that the present complex economic homeostasis has lock-in feedback-loops that operate organically up and down the stack on all participants.As I hear Albert, he is suggesting that 1.Economic and 2.Informational freedoms are prerequisites to empowering a more democratized bottom up psychological-freedom/imaginative-remix capable of circumventing the incumbent winner’s top-down control structures ?

  5. kirklove

    So well done. What a great public speaker and mind. And while I don’t agree with all of it, it’s compelling to ponder and discuss.

    1. pointsnfigures

      Yes, I go around and around on Basic Income. There is dignity in work. It might work in theory, but in practice I think it would probably be a disaster given all the things we have set up in American govt.

      1. PhilipSugar

        I really truly believe that when people that have lived in homeogeneous environments either abroad or sheltered in suburban or urban neighborhoods suggest social solutions they really don’t understand the diversity and what that means in the US

  6. sigmaalgebra

    Good InformationInformation at zero marginal cost? Not really; not yet; not even close.And, right away, we can generalize from information to, say, content or at least content on the Internet.Why not zero? A huge remaining cost is the time to acquire desired, important information.Why? Three reasons:(1) For surprisingly much needed information, it doesn’t exist yet.(2) For far too much important information that does exist in some form, so far there are no good sources.(3) For far too much important information, finding sources that are the best or nearly so takes too much effort.As examples of (1)-(3), here are two large collections of pertinent examples:First example: Information needed to monitor the economy.Second example: Information needed to monitor governments, for US citizens, the US government.CO2 and Climate ChangeHere is another example of poor information — climate change.Yes, as we can see clearly from the historical and geologic records, the climate does change.But there is a current claim about CO2 causing climate change. The claim is that (A) feasibly higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the temperature of earth significantly, (B) CO2 in the atmosphere is the main cause of climate change, and (C) in particular CO2 in the atmosphere from current human activities will warm the planet significantly.So, in science, given such a claim, we test it. If the claim passes the test, then we consider that the claim might be true and continue to test it. As soon as the claim fails a test, we junk the claim.Test 1. We look at the data Al Gore used in his movie An Inconvenient Truth from the ice cores from the Russian Vostok station in Antarctica. There Gore showed that CO2 and temperature rose together and concluded that the higher CO2, from whatever source, caused the higher temperature.Well, the time interval on Gore’s graph was several hundred thousand years so it was difficult to see the truth: If just look at the data up close, then right away can see that the CO2 levels rose about 800 years after the temperature rose, from whatever source.So, claim (B) fails this test.Test 2. There was the Medieval Warm Period. Yes, temperatures were significantly higher. But there is no evidence that CO2 concentrations were higher.So, claim (B) fails this test.Test 3. Shortly after the Medieval Warm Period, we entered the Little Ice Age. But there is no evidence that CO2 concentrations were lower on the way into the Little Ice Age.So, claim (B) fails this test.Test 4. From about 1940 to 1970, temperatures were lower, but there is no evidence that CO2 concentrations were lower.So, claims (B) and (C) fail this test.Test 5. In this test, we test the ability of climate science to make predictions.The climate science community developed a lot of models of global warming driven by CO2. In about 1980, the average of the models and the temperature agreed.Then the models predicted much higher temperatures by 2015. Alas in the graphhttp://www.energyadvocate.c…there are the predictions of about 70 models, and nearly all the models and their average is way, way too high, way above the observed temperatures.So, climate science fails this test.We have now debunked the claims and also climate science. We junk both.Climate Change ScamSo, we don’t have any good science that says that CO2 from human activities will cause significant global warming.So, what is the cause of all the screaming about CO2? Likely follow the money. The concerns about CO2 are a flim-flam, fraud, scam, deliberately deceptive, disgusting, despicable, dangerous, destructive, an ugly manipulation. Still, some people are making money from the scam.Examples of (1)-(3)For(1) For surprisingly much needed information, it doesn’t exist yet.an example for me is some research I did on anomaly detection for larger server farms and associated networks. The work appears to be good, powerful, valuable, etc., but I do see where I could do more research and have still better tools. So far, that information doesn’t exist yet.For another example, the economic importance of showing that P = NP remains enormous for the world economy, but so far no one can say if P = NP is true or false.For(2) For far too much important information that does exist in some form, so far there are no good sources.as far as I can tell, a lot of crucial information about Windows internals and the Windows .NET Framework has no good sources. I have enough information for my startup, but the time to acquire it was huge, and in some respects I could use still more information.E.g., I just spent much of the last three days doing Microsoft Safety Scanner virus scans of my startup project development computer and removed three computer virus infections.Question: How the heck is it even possible for an executing program to corrupt the Windows operating system at all? No such thing should even be possible. It should be possible and routine to run any software at all, including malicious software, safely.E.g., back to IBM’s VM/CMS, it was possible to run any and all software safely, including additional operating systems, without corrupting either VM or CMS. We’ve had apparently severe US military standards for secure computing for decades. So, what information explains how it is so common to infect Windows?In my usage of Windows, I’ve tried to be careful; so, what went wrong? Good information for this is not easy to find.Good information in computing is too often not easy to find, and one reason is that quite generally the computer industry has poor abilities at technical writing.For(3) For far too much important information, finding sources that are the best or nearly so takes too much effort.my view is that good information for how to do various tasks — for both home and work — is mostly not available. My conjectured reason is that the writers and publishers do not believe that publishing good information would be profitable. Instead they publish what entertains readers, excites buyers, etc.E.g., consider something simple, old, and standard, cookbooks and cooking beef stew: At one time I wanted to make good beef stew, started with several apparently respected sources, went very carefully through many expensive trials, and always ended up with disaster.Eventually via some material on food chemistry, meat proteins, etc. I found the key: Do the cooking at about 160 F. Try hard not to let the temperature get over 180 F for very long.Why? The main goals in beef stew are (A) keep the temperature above 140 F or so for food safety, that is, stop the growth of bacteria, (B) melt the collagen, which happens at about 160 F but takes hours, and (C) keep the temperature low enough so don’t cause the proteins to shrink and expel their water.The protein fibers are always tender. So, melt out the collagen and have good, tender, moist beef stew.The crucial points about 160 F were omitted from a long list of beef stew recipes I consulted. I never saw a recipe that mentioned temperature in anything like the required detail. I never once saw a recipe that mentioned temperature in degrees F, C, or K or implied that one should use a thermometer.Why? The cookbook authors and publishers were interested in products that would sell and provide entertainment, not information.The entertainment stops when try to eat the results of following a common recipe that fails to pay careful attention to temperature.

    1. LE

      Why? The main goals in beef stew are (A) keep the temperature above 140 F or so for food safety, that is, stop the growth of bacteria, (B) melt the collagen, which happens at about 160 F but takes hours, and (C) keep the temperature low enough so don’t cause the proteins to shrink and expel their water.One of the things that I always think about is the underpinnings of the steps and why. This is a good example of it. Learn principles, and reasons, not recipes. That way you are in a better position to know the adjustments you can make or what you can skip.

      1. PhilipSugar

        This is so true. I love cooking and if you know the principles you can riff. Same in business. I don’t enjoy baking as much the business analogy is book keeping (not the same as accounting)

    2. Lawrence Brass

      Eating you own dog food is a good software development discipline, maybe the same applies to cooking. Guests usually won’t say the truth, sometimes I get a plate wrong and I know it is wrong but everybody say it is fantastic. Lies.I think that mastering cooking is more a matter of practice than following recipes. There are so many tricks and subleties and different specialities and combinations. That is the fun about it. I have found that recipes explained with videos yield better results than only written recipes.

      1. sigmaalgebra

        Gee, I post about the grand themes of the universe and beyond, use cooking as just a small example, and mostly people are interested in cooking! Gads :-)Cooking is also important! That’s because food is important? It’s a conservation of energy thingy, right? Sometimes people ask me if I like to cook. I say, no, I just like to eat!I used to cook for guests. And my efforts in cooking were about 50% for guests.I got good enough with some white sauce things, but on the brown sauces I never really got past what Escoffier said about how to make the basic foundation brown sauce and that because I didn’t really have a restaurant kitchen with a restaurant supply house. Once I did follow some leads and call a packing house in PA; that was where a lot of NYS retired dairy cows went; they could sell me 55 pound boxes of shin bones that would make great brown stock. When I have more progress with my startup!Sometimes I did make good progress braising goose. It was good.And I made some progress with desserts, Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, Sacher Torte, a lot of eggs and chocolate. I was pretty good with Dad’s American apple pie! Nothing wrong with that! And, I was okay with Dad’s Thanksgiving turkey recipe — Dad was a better cook than Mom! Dad’s recipe is intended for a wild turkey, nearly fat free. Using Dad’s techniques on a current, plump, fat farm raised turkey is wild overkill, but, still, the results are darned good!When my wife and I were in grad school, I used to get 5 pound boxes of sub-16 shrimp (fewer than 16 per pound), cook and clean them, freeze them in little plastic bags about 6 at a time, and have some of my family’s favorite shrimp sauce in the frig. So, late Saturday night, watching a Charlie Chan movie, used to thaw some of the shrimp under running water (that goes fast) and pig out! For desert, took some Sara Lee Pound Cake, put down a slab, covered that with good ice cream, covered that with thawed raspberries, covered that with whipped cream, topped that with a cherry, and washed it down with some sweet, bubbling Italian wine, Asti Spumanti, in some flutes got from West Virgina Glass (there’s some evidence that Jackie went there too for the White House wine glasses). I didn’t suffer too badly in grad school!Once driving on an Interstate, our family cat wanted to be walked. Okay. Then on the hillside was one heck of a good plot of raspberries. So, back to the car, get most appropriate big plastic bowl we had, and pick 2-3 quarts of raspberries. Then rush to the first McDonald’s (maybe we rinsed the raspberries) and cover the raspberries with a lot of their soft-serve ice cream and pig out! It was good!With a lot of trials I developed an okay Lasagne and served it to guests. Once Mom was sick; Dad was with her in the hospital, and some neighbors took pity on my brother and I and brought over a casserole dish of Lasagne. It was just terrific, awash in flavors. I’ve never had such good Italian food since!Wish I knew how the heck to do that! Ah, maybe my startup will say; supposedly one criterion for a good startup is that the founder wants to use it in his own life!Once for guests I did a 7 rib prime rib roast. Simple: Put it in the oven at 350 F or some such, with a meat thermometer, and wait until the right internal temperature, maybe 140 or so — I have notes with details. It was good. The guests were thrilled. The wife of the guests was jealous for years about how my roast came out so good but she had struggled a lot with her super-fancy, high end, super-tech substitute for an ordinary oven!I also did okay with ersatz Memphis picnic pork shoulder BBQ just in my ordinary oven. Memphis Q is chopped and then sauced. By the time get the final product in a sandwich ready to eat, tough to tell not in Memphis listening to FedEx planes overhead.No joke about BBQ: It hits hard on each of sweet, sour, smoke, and pepper as inGray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky, The Elements of Taste, ISBN 0-316-60874-2, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 2001.When I get a dish I like, I take detailed notes. Later I usually wish I’d included more details. But mostly my notes are good enough that I can redo without too much trouble any of the good things I’ve done.Once I improvised an okay Moo Shu Pork. So, get a pork loin and freeze pieces of about a pound each. For a trial, thaw and make match sticks out of one of the pieces, marinate the match sticks, shred the green cabbage, get the other vegetables ready — shiitake mushrooms, wood ears, lilly flowers (I lightly boil them and drain them before adding them to the wok) — and scramble the eggs. Then on the back porch, fire up the propane burner intended for deep frying turkeys (heck of a fire hazard; I’d never try that), get out suitable bowls, tools, etc. and a wok, and go for it. In the end, it’s pretty simple, and it’s okay with Hoisin sauce on the right pancakes. I got 5 quarts at a time — fast, easy dinners for several days! Buying the pancakes is kind of a pain, but the books I have do outline, roughly, how to make them. I’m guessing that a trial or two would be sufficient for okay Chinese pancakes.Yes, often for the TV chefs, etc., video of the dish being prepared is much better documentation than what those chefs write.Once when I was in DC, I went to the Library of Congress to inspect a math book and happened to see a big, thick, glossy book from Germany, in German, intended for trade school education, on deserts.. It looked terrific, but, sadly, I didn’t keep the reference! It looked worth the effort to translate the German — I’m supposed to be able to do that; did do it once for my Ph.D.!Yes, I have some Julia Child things, and a Jacques Pepin thing, but I don’t have the huge Myhrvold thing!Cooking is, uh, on the back burner waiting on my startup!Startup — I’m trying. I just spent three days doing computer virus scans. That’s called an independent exogenous interruption! The scans just completed. So, my system is likely virus free. Where the virus came from I have NO idea. The same virus infects everything from Windows NT to Windows 10. Instead of Windows 11, uh, how about fixing the security holes in Windows?

        1. Lawrence Brass

          Sorry for focusing more on the delicious parts of your post. I did read the full post. It was before lunch and I was hungry and all that juices and melting collagen in the last paragraphs, what would you expect? I am human so it is your fault too.Enjoyed this one also. I was wondering what happened with the cat during the operation. I love that type of improvised adventures, those are usually the best memories.

    3. sachmo

      There are plenty of peer reviewed papers written to support the theory of man made climate change caused by CO2 emissions. Not sure why you would chose an Inconvenient Truth as a target to disprove the theory, when it was clearly made by someone without a strong science background.I think you need to spend about 5 min searching Science Direct if you want to seriously look at why climate scientists from universities all around the world generally accept the CO2 driven climate change as reality.

      1. sigmaalgebra

        You seriously underestimated the importance of the CO2 claims failing the five tests I gave. Scientifically, failing those tests, in simple terms, drives a fatal stake into the heart of the climate science that is alarmed about CO2.The climate scientists had a scientific hypothesis about CO2 and temperature. I tested their hypothesis. Their hypothesis failed the tests. Tests over. Climate science junked. Done.For science, what I gave is enough to bring to a halt at least 99 44/100% of the faith in such climate science. Failing those tests is not just idle, blog chatter and, instead, is a death sentence for the associated climate science. That I did the post is irrelevant; that the tests were failed should be enough for the whole world to junk the climate science.I’m aware of paths such as you mention into the peer-reviewed literature. The problem is, even if those papers are correct on some narrow points, as I showed, those papers are wrong in the bottom line: As I easily showed, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have little or no, certainly no significant, effect on temperature. That’s just rock solid from the five tests I gave.I showed that. It’s done now. Can’t just pass over that. No matter what however many papers say, as in the examples in my tests, the CO2 changes and the temperature changes just do not correspond.For the Al Gore movie, the data he used from the ice cores from the Russian Vostok station in Antarctica is well known and readily available. IIRC, a recent Secretary of Energy or President’s Science Advisor, a respected scientist, used that data also.Gore was claiming that the data was evidence that CO2 caused warming. Well, can debunk that just by looking carefully at that data — the CO2 went up about 800 years after the temperature went up. So, the CO2 did not cause the higher temperatures. That was one of my five tests.If want to discount anything Al Gore said, fine with me.Then there are the four other tests I gave.It’s just super simple: Over the past 2000 years, temperatures have gone up and down and CO2 concentrations didn’t correspond. Maybe some people claim that CO2 corresponded since the cooling of 1940 to 1970, but that’s the best empirical data of actual warming from actual CO2 concentrations data the alarmists have. There is about 2000 years earlier where there is no correspondence.Likely the simplest case to understand is the Little Ice Age — it really was darned colder and caused some famous events in history — but no one is claiming that CO2 concentrations were lower.What I gave is not science of what causes temperatures to change. That’s really difficult science. But what I gave, still, is a rock solid debunking of the claims that CO2 plays a significant role in temperature on earth. That debunking is fully serious as science, that is, as rejecting bad scientific claims.Good science can be very difficult; that may be the case for climate science. But sometimes bad science is easy to debunk; that is the case for climate science that is alarmed about CO2.With what I gave, just that, the climate science claims about CO2 warming the earth is just junk. They can write all the peer-reviewed papers they want, but we already know, fully solid from just what I gave, that their science is junk. Science — tough subject, and climate science that says that CO2 plays a significant role in the temperature of earth is shown to be wrong — we just junk the science. It’s just that simple.For why CO2 warms the atmosphere? Well, we know, as above, it essentially doesn’t, but here is the argument that maybe it might: Light from the sun passes through the atmosphere and gets absorbed by the surface of the earth and, thus, warms that surface. That warmer surface, then, radiates, as Planck black body radiation, heavily in the infrared.The CO2 molecule does not absorb visible light — if it did, then we could see our breath as we exhale. Or we could see CO2 escaping from carbonated beverages, beer, Champagne, etc. — but we can’t. So, CO2 does not absorb visible light. Sorry, Tom Friedman of the NYT.But CO2 does absorb some infrared light. CO2 absorbs in three narrow bands out in the infrared, one band for each of bending, stretching, and twisting of the molecule. Then so absorbing infrared light, from the Planck black body radiation, the CO2 molecule has higher temperature and, thus, warms the atmosphere.So, visible light from the sun enters the atmosphere, but the infrared light from the Planck black body radiation from the warmer surface has a tough time getting back out of the atmosphere. That situation, of light coming in but infrared light not being able to get back out, also happens in a standard greenhouse (with a glass roof) and, thus, is called the greenhouse effect.Then to predict temperatures, take that warming, do a lot with diffusion math, drop all that and more into the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid flow, the version for compressible flow, for the whole planet, do the right things for clouds, snow, various winds, lakes and oceans, handle radiation from earth into outer space, under conditions of night and day, cloudy or clear, handle the similar greenhouse effects of water vapor, handle water vapor from winds and temperatures, handle CO2 taken up by plants or absorbed or emitted by the oceans and emitted by rotting vegetation, handle CO2 from other sources including human activity, of course, handle the ocean temperatures and currents, water to and from the oceans and lakes, handle CO2 from volcanoes, both visible and especially under the oceans, and more.Then write a lot of computer software for a simulation, and predict temperature for the next 50 years.The climate scientists claim to have done all that work. They made their temperature predictions. I included the graph of their predictions. Now we can easily observe that their predictions were on average and in nearly all cases way, way too high compared with observed temperatures.So, their predictions were wildly wrong. So their efforts at climate science flopped. In that case, in science, we junk the candidate science. So, net, on the prediction test we have to junk the climate science that is alarmed about CO2.In science, it really is just that simple: Have some candidate science; make a prediction; observe that the prediction is seriously wrong; and then just junk the science.For a lot in science, e.g., the motions of the bodies in the solar system, we can make predictions that are spot on. The same was done for the recent Ligo measurements of black hole collisions. Much the same was done for the mass of the Higgs.How to calculate where in the spectrum molecules absorb? Okay, it turns out, from E. Wigner, etc., take the molecule and take the finite algebraic group of transformations of the molecule that leave it looking the same, e.g., hydrogen atoms move into hydrogen atoms, etc. Then with that group, some group representation theory, and some quantum mechanics, can just write down all the possible spectral lines of the molecule. Uh, the group representation theory was in my ugrad honors paper. That little bit of quantum mechanics is a pillar of molecular spectroscopy and identifying molecules. It’s rock solid and spot on. The predictions is makes are true.One of the main tests of science is the ability to make correct predictions. Well, on the effects of CO2, climate science fails badly. So, we junk climate science.It’s just that simple. And it’s rock solid.At this point, the climate science that says that CO2 will warm the planet is like the Mayans who claimed that they had to kill people and pour their blood on a certain rock or the sun would quit moving across the sky –http://books.google.com/boo…from page 76 ofSusan Milbrath, ‘Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies)’, ISBN-13 978-0292752269, University of Texas Press, 2000.withIndeed, blood sacrifice is required for the sun to move, according to Aztec cosmology (Durian 1971:179; Sahaguin 1950 – 1982, 7:8).Both the climate scientists and the Mayans were wrong.We are left with no good science that says that CO2 has any significant effect on temperature on earth.Yes, the temperature changes, but we have no good science that says that the changes are caused by CO2, and we have a lot of rock solid data that says that CO2 is essentially irrelevant.If people keep screaming about CO2 warming the planet, then maybe just follow the money.Actually, there is some science that has data that does fit. But this science has nothing to do with CO2 and, instead, is based on sun spots, cosmic rays, and cloud formation. E.g., this science explains the Little Ice Age just fine where the CO2 explanation is just laughable.

        1. sachmo

          >tests I gave. Scientifically, failing those tests, in simple terms, drives a fatal stake into the heart of the climate science that is alarmed about CO2.The climate scientists had a scientific hypothesis about CO2 and temperature. I tested their hypothesis. Their hypothesis failed the tests. Tests over. Climate science junked. Done.Your tests are bogus… You have chosen completely arbitrary exemplars, and you haven’t even defined acceptance criteria for what constitutes a pass or a fail…>It’s just super simple: Over the past 2000 years, temperatures have gone up and down and CO2 concentrations didn’t correspond. Maybe some people claim that CO2 corresponded since the cooling of 1940 to 1970, but that’s the best empirical data of actual warming from actual CO2 concentrations data the alarmists have. There is about 2000 years earlier where there is no correspondence.The problem with making statements like this is that they are just plain false. attached is a graph of the last 800 years… by all means, please reply with a graph for CO2 and temperature for exactly the last 2000 years. On every time scale of whatever thousand year duration, CO2 and temperature show a very high degree of correlation. https://uploads.disquscdn.chttps://uploads.disquscdn.c…I’d dig into your post and respond line by line, but I frankly don’t have the time. At a big picture level, I would agree that there are many factors that affect the Earth’s temperature over time – the cycles of the sun are definitely a major factor.Where you and I disagree is that we need a complete working model of the Earth’s temperature to determine that a particular factor can drive the output of that black box.If the earth’s climate is a black box, and there are 100 variables such as the sun and water vapor that affect the final output, we can still run a number of experiments on just one one factor and determine that this factor does affect the final output.You might consider these experiments to be past data, and when you factor in the sheer number of data points and statistical power, there’s a near certainty at this point that CO2 is one of many factors that drives temperature for the planet.It’s fine if CO2 has feedback mechanisms that lag (pertaining to your 800 year ice core argument earlier), there is still a clear relationship between an increase in CO2 and temperature for the planet.Spend 5 minutes looking at peer reviewed literature and this is obvious.

          1. sigmaalgebra

            Your tests are bogus… You have chosen completely arbitrary exemplars, and you haven’t even defined acceptance criteria for what constitutes a pass or a fail… > Your tests are bogus…Not at all; the tests are just fine.> You have chosen completely arbitrary exemplars,That’s just fine. The claim of the CO2 alarmists is that more CO2 results in higher temperature. For this claim to be true, it has to hold essentially always. Maybe we’d make an exception in the case of a gamma ray burst. So, if the claim fails even once, then we reject the claim. I found several times the claim failed strongly.Or, if Newton’s second law ever failed even a little just once, then we would junk it. Same for the equivalence of inertial mass and gravitational mass, law of conservation of energy, law of conservation of momentum, law of conservation of angular momentum, law of conservation of charge, the special relativity E = mc^2, the law of gravity (from Einstein’s general relativity or in simpler cases Newton’s version), etc. But none of these have failed. They are good science. The claims about CO2 and temperature are bad science.> you haven’t even defined acceptance criteria for what constitutes a pass or a fail…I did you a favor: Come up with any reasonable criteria you want, and the CO2 claims will still fail all my tests. The problem with making statements like this is that they are just plain false. You have not given any useful evidence or found anything I wrote that is wrong at all. attached is a graph of the last 800 years… Your graph claims it is for the past 800,000 years.So, that is likely the data from the ice cores at the Russian Vostok station in Antarctica.As I noted, looking at that data carefully, the CO2 concentrations we up about 800 years AFTER the temperature went up. So, the higher CO2 clearly cannot have been the cause of the higher temperature. CO2 and temperature show a very high degree of correlation. Yes, they do, and that fact is absolutely, positively, completely, utterly, totally, meaningless and irrelevant to the claims of the CO2 alarmists.Smoking and lung cancer correlate, but we know that smoking causes lung cancer and we certainly don’t think that lung cancer causes smoking.Sunburn correlates with skin cancer, and we accept that sunburn is a cause of skin cancer, but we certainly don’t think that the skin cancers caused the sunburns.For your CO2 and temperature data, clearly, likely the higher temperatures caused more biological activity that caused the higher CO2. The higher CO2 certainly did not cause the higher temperature 800 years earlier. At a big picture level, I would agree that there are many factors that affect the Earth’s temperature over time – the cycles of the sun are definitely a major factor. Mostly I just debunked the main claims of the climate scientists alarmed about CO2. That debunking was and remains rock solid.But it is important to appreciate that I did NOT give a solid science of the climate of earth.Your guesses about “a big picture level” are not good science either. It’s fine if CO2 has feedback mechanisms that lag (pertaining to your 800 year ice core argument earlier), That concept of “feedback” seems to require time travel and, thus, fills a much needed gap in science and also just common sense. Where you and I disagree is that we need a complete working model of the Earth’s temperature to determine that a particular factor can drive the output of that black box. You are disagreeing with something I didn’t claim.Instead, the climate scientists made some predictions of temperature, and over the past 10 years we have seen that the predictions were wildly wrong. From that we junk the climate science.Possibly curiously, from just that failure, we cannot junk the claims about CO2. The reason is that the failure of the predictions could be that the climate scientists are just terrible computer programmers, fail grade school arithmetic, don’t understand the Navier-Stokes equations, etc.But we are left with no good science that says that CO2 will cause significant warming of earth over the next, say, 100 years. We do not expect that there can be such good science because just from my first four tests an intuitive conclusion is that realistic levels of CO2 have little or nothing at all to do with temperature. If the earth’s climate is a black box, and there are 100 variables such as the sun and water vapor that affect the final output, we can still run a number of experiments on just one one factor and determine that this factor does affect the final output. That’s statement makes no progress. You might consider these experiments to be past data, and when you factor in the sheer number of data points and statistical power, there’s a near certainty at this point that CO2 is one of many factors that drives temperature for the planet. Not at all. The empirical data, back 800,000 years does not support this claim. And the greenhouse effect alone doesn’t say that the warming will be significant. And the climate models based on the greenhouse effect made wildly wrong predictions so failed to support that warming from the greenhouse effect will be significant.Again, we have no good science that says feasible higher concentrations of CO2 will cause significant increases in temperature. there is still a clear relationship between an increase in CO2 and temperature for the planet. Maybe there is: Apparently as in the 800,000 year old Vostok data, maybe higher temperatures resulted in more biological activity which resulted in higher concentrations of CO2 800 years later.No, we don’t need carbon taxes, subsidies for wind and solar power, subsidies for electric cars, EPA shutting down coal fired electric power plants, etc. and, indeed, for our economy, standard of living, and national security we very much do not want such things.The climate scientist alarmists are trying to talk the US and the rest of the industrialized world into shooting itself in the gut for just absolutely no good reason.Again, the CO2 alarmists are about as far off track as the Mayans who killed people to pour their blood on a rock to keep the sun moving across the sky. Spend 5 minutes looking at peer reviewed literature and this is obvious. Nonsense. The failures of climate science are due to the climate scientists, not me, and are not from what peer-reviewed literature I have read/written.

          2. sachmo

            Your original ‘tests’ aren’t even tests w/out acceptance criteria. What you are writing is pseudoscience junk. You are definitely a smart enough guy to know that you need real acceptance criteria – or otherwise just say “it’s my opinion” don’t pretend that you are actually subjecting a data set to any kind of scientific rigor. I’m not going to bother to set acceptance criteria for you, I haven’t made the ridiculous claim that all climate scientists are wrong.>You have not given any useful evidence or found anything I wrote that is wrong at all.I’ve posted graphs showing a very high degree of correlation between CO2 and temperature. You previously claimed that they showed no correlation for the last 2000 years.You have posted no evidence. Find a graph of the last 2000 years and post it if you feel that your statement was correct. It’s not correct by the way. The last 2000 years (don’t cherry pick a 10 year segment, get a full 2000 year data set) show correlation between CO2 and temperature.>As I noted, looking at that data carefully, the CO2 concentrations we up about 800 years AFTER the temperature went up. So, the higher CO2 clearly cannot have been the cause of the higher temperature.Over an 800k period, the CO2 concentrations varied in terms of lag. When it did lag, the prevailing theory is that there is a positive feedback loop. In other cases, other gases such as methane drove the climate change – which doesn’t disprove that CO2 is also a driver of climate change. I don’t think that you’ve really looked into this very much.>No, we don’t need carbon taxes, subsidies for wind and solar power, subsidies for electric cars, EPA shutting down coal fired electric power plants, etc. and, indeed, for our economy, standard of living, and national security we very much do not want such things.We do need carbon taxes. There is an abundance of science that shows at a benchtop level increase CO2 content of a system increases temperature. There are fairly detailed anaylses that also point to this happening at a planetary level. No it’s not an experiment that we can run at a 95% confidence level, but there is a tremendous amount of data going far back that all show the temperature of the earth in lockstep with CO2 levels, among other variables.>The failures of climate science are due to the climate scientists, not me, and are not from what peer-reviewed literature I have read/written.If you don’t bother to read papers that you don’t agree with, then its very easy to stick your head in the sand and deny what’s obvious to actual scientists.

          3. sigmaalgebra

            Your writing and arguments are lies and junk and not worth further responses.

          4. sachmo

            There are no ‘lies’, I think that you are not used to being challenged for ridiculous claims. You could easily find a graph or shred of evidence to support your claim that for the last 2000 years CO2 had no correlation with temperature. You haven’t posted anything like that, b/c it doesn’t exist. Good luck in future debates.

          5. sigmaalgebra

            I never said “correlation”. Your claim that I did is a lie.At best you are profoundly confused about correlation, correspondence, and causality and have some serious reading comprehension problems.Get use to it: There is no solid scientific evidence that realistic concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have a significant effect on temperature. In fact, from the data, the effect of CO2 on temperature has to be at most tiny. E.g., we have a clear case where temperature went down significantly but CO2 didn’t; a case where temperature went up significantly but CO2 didn’t, and a case where temperature went down but CO2 went up. Moreover the proposed science that says that CO2 has a significant effect was junked once their predictions proved wildly false.I didn’t say “correlation”.

          6. sachmo

            >It’s just super simple: Over the past 2000 years, temperatures have gone up and down and CO2 concentrations didn’t correspond. Maybe some people claim that CO2 corresponded since the cooling of 1940 to 1970, but that’s the best empirical data of actual warming from actual CO2 concentrations data the alarmists have. There is about 2000 years earlier where there is no correspondence.The above are your words. It’s absolutely ridiculous to claim that I’m “lying”… Correspond and correlate used in the context that you have are synonyms.>At best you are profoundly confused about correlation, correspondence, and causalityUm, no… You’ve made a ridiculous claim about 2000 years of CO2 not “corresponding” with temperature. Whether we use the word “correspond” or correlate, that’s a false claim.You’ve claimed that I am liar for point out this was a false claim.And for your original argument, where you apply certain “tests” you don’t even define acceptance criteria to judge whether a data set passes or fails.This is complete junk science.To gain some credibility in this debate:1) Define some acceptance criteria for your so called tests, and show us that the data set doesn’t pass.2) Show us proof that CO2 and temperature didn’t “correspond” to each other over the last 2000 years.Point #2 is not even debateable. It’s a false claim and you are too stubborn to concede it. And frankly it’s disingenuous to call me a “liar” for pointing this out.Point #1 is the starting point for a REAL debate on what causes the lags between CO2 and temperature – but even a cursory examination of any science database will show that climate scientists have models that can explain these lags. But I’m not going to even get into this debate with you until you actually present a data set and acceptance criteria.The reason you are unwilling to do so, is because you don’t want to be confronted with actual science.

          7. sigmaalgebra

            “Correspondence” and “correlation” are not synonyms at all.Correlation is from some math, in elementary statistics, the Pearson R. It’s a number between -1 and 1 and can be regarded as a cosine. What you do is take an inner product and scale it so that the inner product is between two vectors, each with length 1.Correspondence is quite different.I said “correspond”. I did not say “correlation”.

          8. sachmo

            A correspondence is an ordered triple (X,Y,R), where R is a relation from X to Y. Using CO2 and temperature as proxies for those variables, there is a relationship between CO2 and temperature. Regardless of causality, which we can continue to debate, there is a direct relationship between CO2 and temperature over the last 2000 years. That’s a fact. You were wrong earlier, and you should concede the point.

          9. sigmaalgebra

            Your definition is from sloppy down to meaningless. When addressing math at the level of ordered triples, for defining a relation, saying that X, Y are “variables” is BS.Here’s how such things are supposed to go: Given sets X, Y, then R is a relation on X and Y (or, if you will, on the order pair (X,Y)) provided R is a subset of the Cartesian product set X x Y.Can go on to define a symmetric, etc. relation, an equivalence relation, a function, etc.Once have defined a relation, there’s no need to define a correspondence.Even if define a relation, that alone means nothing for the issue of the claim that changes in concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere of earth is the only significant cause of changes in the average global temperature.And, also correlation in the sense of the Pearson R is similarly irrelevant.My use of correspondence is essentially just the common dictionary meaning, In particular, again, once again, over again, one more time, we have lots of examples where the correspondence of the claim fails:(1) As in the Vostok data, temperature went up significantly when CO2 didn’t.(2) Then 800 years later CO2 went up but temperature didn’t.(3) In the Medieval Warming Period, temperature went up but CO2 didn’t.(4) In the Little Ice Age, temperature went down but CO2 didn’t until much later.(5) From about 1940 to 1970, there temperatures went down but CO2 stayed the same or likely went up some.And more.So, we have examples (A) we got higher temperatures without higher CO2, (B) we got higher CO2 without higher temperatures, (C) we lower temperatures without lower CO2.So, temperature changes and CO2 chances fail to correspond (dictionary meaning) as in the claim.So, the claim fails.Moreover, from such observations, at least intuitively, CO2 seems to have little or nothing to do with temperature.And, the causes of the changes in temperature are something other than CO2.One candidate for the cause of the changes in temperature is changes in the rate of sun spot with more sun spots leading to higher temperatures and fewer sun spots leading to lower temperatures. A leading example is the Little Ice Age where temperatures were significantly lower and there were nearly no sunspots at all.Net, I don’t believe that CO2 from human activities will cause significant global warming, and I do believe that restrictions on CO2 are a way to shoot the economy in the gut for no good reason.

          10. sachmo

            >My use of correspondence is essentially just the common dictionary meaningWell… then you’re still wrong, b/c CO2 levels DO correspond to temperature over 2000 years. There is just no getting around it, no matter how hard you try to obfuscate this. You are most certainly welcome to post some evidence that they don’t, and it’s not surprising that you haven’t yet.a) Vostok Data – I posted 800k years worth of data earlier in this thread. Take a look at those graphs again. CO2 DOES correspond to temperature. Those graphs move in lock-step. You can argue whether that implies causality or not, fine, we can continue that debate separately, but to say that it doesn’t correspond is just false. There is simply no way you can say that CO2 does not correspond to temperature.Take a look at the graph again… I’ll wait.b) 800 year lag – lag or no lag, CO2 still moves in lock step with temperature. The 2 variables correlate / correspond / whatever… This is a very random claim, b/c it doesn’t lag a strict 800 years. There’s a lot of local variability. And again, you haven’t even presented a specific data set or highlighted a specific period, or shown any sort of criteria for what a ‘lag’ is… But even a cursory search thru science journals will show that scientists have been able to flag anomalies. Methane for example contributes to temperature IN ADDITION to CO2. Things like major volcanoes erupt. For for very small or specific periods, you can see lags, but there are also periods where CO2 rises ahead of temperature. Also, there are things such as positive feedback loops. For example, permafrost melts, methane is released, temperature rises even faster. CO2 can CAUSE this to happen, temperature can increase dramatically (b/c of methane) and then CO2 can rise more slowly after even more positive feedback. There are plenty of climate models that explain this.Go look at real papers instead of hiding your head in the sand. The truth is out there in peer reviewed literature.3 & 4) Define the actual dates and show me some evidence. It’s likely that you will only find REGIONAL temperature data… There’s a great discussion of the last 2000 years here:http://dotearth.blogs.nytim…The gist of this is that many papers failed to take into account temperatures in the southern hemisphere. Most of our data of 2000 year temperature comes from tree rings and ocean sediments.78 authors collaborated on this, and basically concluded that we had a minor cooling for much of this period until suddenly global temperatures shot up in the last 200 years or so.5) 40-70 is cherry picking a very tiny date range. There’s more variability the smaller the range you pick. I could pick 2 year periods in the last 10 years and show declines in temperature vs CO2, even though the trend over the last 10 years was SHARPLY up. 1900 to 2000 temperatures went WAY up and so did CO2. 30 years is not a representative sample.—Big Picture – there is correspondance between CO2 and temperature. There is clear cut rise in temperature as CO2 dramatically rose in the last 150 years.

          11. sigmaalgebra

            Your argument is still totally messed up. Your examples of correspondence and/or correlation say nothing about CO2 causing the temperature to rise.For the crucial issues in correspondence, I’ve given those to you several times. Once should have been enough. And each time I gave you several time periods — really once, e.g., the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warming, should have been enough to shoot down the claim of the global warming hysterics.In this context a simple random sample is essentially irrelevant. Why: Because the claim says that when CO2 goes up, then later but right away temperature goes up, and when CO2 goes down then later but right away temperature goes down. In science to shoot down this claim need just one, one, only one, one is enough, counter example, and we have several such counter examples.Find one counterexample of Newton’s second law outside of either quantum mechanics or relativity, one, just one, only one, and right away get a free trip to Stockholm. To shoot down a claim in science or math takes just one counterexample. Same for conservation of charge, momentum, or energy.You finally explained your feedback effect. Assuming the claim about CO2 is true, there might be some such effect. But from the counterexamples, we know that the claim about CO2 is false.If you want to talk about methane alone as a greenhouse gas, and assume that more methane results later but soon in higher temperatures, then maybe such a “feedback” situation could happen. But there are three biggie problems:(1) There’s nothing in the ice core record that supports that any such thing with methane ever happened.(2) Yes, methane is a greenhouse gas, but our models for how greenhouse gasses raise temperature were total junk in the case of CO2. In general, for any greenhouse gas, just super tough to do accurate model building. Again, are into global Navier-Stokes equations, for the compressible case, the oceans and their currents, biological effects, and …. Can’t do that computation.(3) Sources of a lot of methane are tough to find. Septic tanks, cattle, and natural gas leakages are apparently not enough.Yes, 1900 to 2000, both CO2 and temperature went up. So did the bra size of US women and temperature. So did the top speed of cars and temperature. So did the height of US children at age 15 and temperature. And the number of whales went down and temperature went up. The number of cod fish went down, and temperature went up.Again, to make anything out of the 1900 to 2000 rise of both CO2 and temperature, we need some modeling to say how much CO2 raises temperature how much, and all the modelling flopped.Net, again, so far, the weather’s fine. There’s nothing in the record back nearly a million years that says that CO2 will raise the temperature even enough to measure. The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas alone doesn’t say that human sources or natural sources of CO2 will have a significant effect on temperature. The efforts to model the effects of CO2 on temperature flopped. Until years 1900 to 2000, temperatures went up and down, but there were too many intervals where CO2 didn’t go up but temperature did (e.g., Medieval Warm period) and when temperature went down but CO2 didn’t (Little Ice Age). So, with just these two examples, the claim is contradicted and found to be false. The claim is debunked, is dead. I’ve explained this point to you over and over, and you just fail to get it.So, we have no scientific reason or empirical reason to regard human sources of CO2 as having a significant effect on temperature, and we have still less reason to do what the alarmists want — impose carbon taxes and shoot in the gut much of our economy.Again, the claim about CO2 is debunked as science and is a flim-flam, fraud, scam to get money and power. No thanks.There are a lot of threats — asteroids, gamma ray bursts, wandering black holes, Yellowstone erupting again (put a layer of volcanic ash 1000 feet thick across much of the US from Yellowstone to the US east coast), anti-biotic resistant bacteria, and more. F’get about CO2.

          12. sachmo

            >Your examples of correspondence and/or correlation say nothing about CO2 causing the temperature to rise.This debate has not been about causality… yet at least. Before we can even argue causality, we have to agree on some basic facts. I’ve been arguing correspondence / correlation, b/c CO2 DOES correspond to temperature over almost any major timescale.> I gave you several time periods — really once, e.g., the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warming, should have been enough to shoot down the claim of the global warming hysterics.I haven’t seen your evidence or links… I included a link in my last rebuttal that specifically asserts that taking into account GLOBAL (not European) temperatures, the last 2000 years have been mostly cooling and then shoots up in temperature with the rise of CO2 concentrations. 78 authors worked on this paper. I’d really like to see this little ice age / medieval warming evidence that rebutts this.>In this context a simple random sample is essentially irrelevant. Why: Because the claim says that when CO2 goes up, then later but right away temperature goes up, and when CO2 goes down then later but right away temperature goes down. In science to shoot down this claim need just one, one, only one, one is enough, counter example, and we have several such counter examples.Um… no. You can pick the 2 year period of 1998 – 1999 for example and say that CO2 was rising but temperature has dropped. That would be a very silly assertion to make. CO2 traps heat, but a lot of that heat get captured in the oceans for example, so surface temperature isn’t going to follow CO2 concentrations minute by minute. If you take the 10 year period from 1998 – 2008 you see temperature go WAY up, but even that is a tiny slice. If you take the 100 year period from 1908 to 2008 there’s just no argument to be made for CO2 not having an effect on temperature.The claim of climate scientists is not that CO2 rises and temperature rises exactly 1 second later. The claim is that as the ppm of CO2 rises, the average global temperature trends upwards over time, which is true, and further that over a long time period (i.e. 100 years), there could be widespread problems for humans living on the planet in the form of things like drought or sea level rise.>(1) There’s nothing in the ice core record that supports that any such thing with methane ever happened.Um… what? Scientists have uncovered between 5 and 7 major extinction events in the fossil history of the earth. The nastiest one, which involved something like 90% of all animal life dying is strongly correlated with a runaway greenhouse effect and very high levels of methane in the atmosphere. There is a VERY CLEAR record of methane ppm around this time, temperature spiking, and significant die off of life on the planet.>(2) Yes, methane is a greenhouse gas, but our models for how greenhouse gasses raise temperature were total junk in the case of CO2. In general, for any greenhouse gas, just super tough to do accurate model building. Again, are into global Navier-Stokes equations, for the compressible case, the oceans and their currents, biological effects, and …. Can’t do that computation.I would agree that models going back far aren’t perfect, but that’s mostly because our data isn’t perfect. We’re extracting ice cores in the middle of the arctic / antarctic hundreds of feet deep and frankly the scientists doing this are doing so on a shoestring budget. The models we have aren’t bad, and there is a high degree of coherence among the data…Meaning, the tree rings we sample from across the globe agrees with ocean sediment that we sample from different places across the globe, agrees with the overall fossil record of things like extinction events, agrees with what we would expect for percentage of certain gases in the atmosphere / rough temperature models. The exactness of the models aren’t perfect, b/c the underlying data is not complete. But overall, the big picture is very clear, we know that gases like CO2 and methane are strongly correlated with temperature.>(3) Sources of a lot of methane are tough to find. Septic tanks, cattle, and natural gas leakages are apparently not enough.There is a massive amount of methane trapped in permafrost from partially decayed plant matter, both below the ocean floor and in the northern tundras (Siberia). This permafrost melt is the most immediate cause of methane release into the atmosphere. In times past it could have been this coupled with super-vocanoes.>Again, to make anything out of the 1900 to 2000 rise of both CO2 and temperature, we need some modeling to say how much CO2 raises temperature how much, and all the modelling flopped.Um, no, over the last 100 years the CO2 and temperature have correlated very strongly. The modeling has not all ‘flopped’.That’s like saying that modeling a heat exchanger has ‘flopped’ b/c it doesn’t predict the temperature at one arbitrary point in the system. The overall model can work (meaning we can predict the global average) and we can still be uncertain about individual points in the system. The global models of earth’s temperature are just fine over the last 200 years.>The efforts to model the effects of CO2 on temperature flopped. Until years 1900 to 2000, temperatures went up and down, but there were too many intervals where CO2 didn’t go up but temperature did (e.g., Medieval Warm period) and when temperature went down but CO2 didn’t (Little Ice Age). So, with just these two examples, the claim is contradicted and found to be false. The claim is debunked, is dead. I’ve explained this point to you over and over, and you just fail to get it.Did you read the link that I included in the last rebuttal. Pull your head out of the sand for a minute. 78 authors have gotten together and collaborated from around the globe in one of the largest peer reviewed studies to cover the last 2000 years. They have a coherent explanation for this period – and I think you have the basic facts about Medieval warm and little ice age wrong… but you can clarify that by ACTUALLY LINKING TO A SOURCE LIKE I HAVE…. my rebuttal is an ACTUAL CITATION OF A PAPER THAT EXPLAINS WHAT HAPPENED DURING THIS PERIOD… BY REAL SCIENTISTS… so yeah, I have been paying attention to your arguments… do you ignore everything that you happen to disagree with?>Again, the claim about CO2 is debunked as science and is a flim-flam, fraud, scam to get money and power. No thanks.Sadly, the opposite is true. There are large industries that make a tremendous amount of money that don’t want to pay for pollution clean up.Consider the ozone hole for a second… If we had not enacted legislation banning CFCs from the atmosphere, by another 20 years from now, the Ozone layer would be almost entirely depleted across the globe. Being outside for more than 10 minutes on a summer day (anywhere, even northern cities like NYC) would result in severe sun burns… The actions we took in the 90s have stopped the hole from growing worse, and it slowly is on the mend. The direct result is that we can still go outside and not get sunburns / cancer.There are things that we humans do that have effects on a global scale. Pull your head out of the sand, this is not a scam. If you actually look at peer reviewed literature, there are explanations for every one of the silly arguments that you keep pulling from nowhere.

          13. sigmaalgebra

            > This debate has not been about causality…Of course it is. Causality is about all there is in this debate.If higher CO2 does not CAUSE higher temperatures, then the whole CO2-global warming issue is silly.Moreover, if we don’t have solid scientific proof of the claim, then going for carbon taxes is likely irresponsible.> I haven’t seen your evidence or links…Do your own Google search on the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age.> I’d really like to see this little ice age / medieval warming evidence that rebuts this.Your paper with 72 authors talking about 1900 to 2000 is irrelevant.Why: Again, once again, over again, one more time, the claim is that higher CO2 concentrations cause higher temperatures and are the only significant cause of higher temperatures. Then, sure lower CO2 concentrations cause lower temperatures.That’s the claim.To be true, the claim has to hold in all examples. Just one significant case where the claim fails shows that the claim as a whole is false.Well, the claim fails in the Vostok data, the Medieval Warming Period, and the Little Ice Age. That’s several quite significant failures, and we only need one.So, the claim fails.> But overall, the big picture is very clear, we know that gases like CO2 and methane are strongly correlated with temperature.Even if true, we already know that the claim fails.> Um, no, over the last 100 years the CO2 and temperature have correlated very strongly. The modeling has not all ‘flopped’.That there was a correlation is irrelevant. What is crucial is that some proposed science made some predictions that were observed to be wildly wrong. In that case, we say that the propose science is junk. So, the science is junk.That there might have been some correlation is irrelevant.Maybe the efforts to predict temperatures were successful in using up computer time, but we already know that the claim is false. Nothing in other time periods or correlations can change the basic fact that we have shown with just observed data that the claim is false.Since we know that the claim is false, what happened from 1900 to 2000 is irrelevant — the claim still fails.That in some cases, even millions of cases, where there was higher CO2 and also higher temperatures would NOT establish the claim.We know that we can’t establish the claim because the claim is false.Even if we didn’t already know that the claim was false, establishing that claim would be difficult. Likely the best way would be detailed calculations from first principles of the physics, chemistry, and biology. Such calculations were tried; their predictions were wildly in conflict with observed temperatures and, thus, failed.So, we are left with no good scientific support for the claim. And we have observed data that totally destroy the claim.So, the claim is proved false.So, there is no scientific reason to be concerned about CO2 raising temperatures and no scientific reason about global warming to restrict the emissions of CO2, to impose carbon taxes, or to restrict the use of fossil fuels.

          14. sachmo

            >Causality is about all there is in this debate.You are running away from your earlier arguments. Before we can even begin to actually debate, we need to agree on a set of facts from which to form our arguments.The FACT that I have still not seen you acknowledge, is that CO2 and temperature are correlated and correspond to one another from 0 to 2000 AD. If and when you concede this point, we can begin to debate causality. If you can’t concede a basic fact like this… well then there’s no point. You may as well be hallucinating.>Do your own Google search on the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age.I have, I cited a paper refuting your arguments of any anomaly in this period.>Your paper with 72 authors talking about 1900 to 2000 is irrelevant.That paper was from 0 to 2000 AD – the same period for which you claimed that CO2 and temperature did not correspond to each other. Which is totally false by the way… ::sigh::Look, you’ve completely retreated at this point from even arguing that temperature and CO2 don’t correlate and don’t correspond. You are now arguing causality. I’m willing to argue causality – but before we get there, one of the FACTS that I’m going to cite for my argument is that CO2 and temperature strongly correspond (among other things that I cite).My final point is simply this — If we trace this thread back your initial statement, it was totally wrong. CO2 and temperature correlate strongly over pretty much every 100 year period we have on record. I’ve linked numerous papers and graphs specifically showing this.I have not seen you link a single paper showing that CO2 and temperature do not correspond or correlate.I think at this point you are burying your head in the sand. Good luck.

  7. george

    Always enjoy listening to Albert, he tends to present his views through data dependency… When evaluating what’s coming next; My takeaway:Age of Personal Empowerment = Universal Digital Technology + Zero Marginal Cost

  8. LE

    Great talk. But would like to know how being able to make a diagnosis at zero marginal cost translates into helping people. Treatment costs money and needs to be available. Someone in a third world country (or even your next door neighbor) with a diagnosis and no access to healthcare could actually be worse off then if they never knew in the first place what their problem was. For example in the case where the outlook requires treatment (anxiety factor).

    1. Richard

      Interesting perspective by Albert that diagnosis of a disease and treatment is perceived to be trivial but the diagnosis and investment in a startup requires a great sage.

      1. LE

        Great point and certainly an irony. (And that great sage requires all partners to agree as well.)

        1. Richard

          Yeah not that it is relevant but if the mark of a successful VC were the Earnings of their portfolio companies versus the exits of their portfolio companies, would usv be a top vc firm?

    2. SubstrateUndertow

      What is the global ratio of diagnostic to treatment costs ?Although treatment is much more expense for a single found problem the diagnostic costs are much more broad as they often resolve the need for any treatment and if diagnosis is swift and accurate it could seriously help constrain treatment costs.Is the potential for savings on the diagnostic side enough to help pay for treatment costs ?I have no idea !TranslationI’m to lazy to Google it so can someone here please do that for me 🙂

  9. LE

    Most of us don’t spend enough of our attention thinking about the most fundamental thing…which is our purpose in life…why am I here…what am I doing…why am I doing that…Instead we rush around from one thing to the next…and we’re busy busy busy…make ourselves busy in our free time..I think in part because we don’t want to confront that particular questionPurpose in life? Why am I here? Why do I do what I do?I am happy being busy and I don’t buy into this thinking at all. It sounds very new age and/or something that someone who is suffering from mild depression might think about. Why is it a good idea (if you are happy) to even go down this road? When you watch a basketball game do you question why you do that? Arnold likes wine, JLM likes his old car, Fred likes to listen to music. Gotham Gal likes dining out in restaurants and cooking. Just go with it and enjoy. Why is it fun to go down a ski slope? To look at a woman’s breasts? If your brain thinks it’s fun that’s enough. Questioning things in this way can be a recipe for disaster. If something isn’t broke, and you are happy, don’t try to dissect it and try to fix those things that are working for you. There is no need to question the underpinnings of everything and anything. Except if you are trying to make a change. Or you are unhappy in some significant way. In some minor way, well, that’s to be expected.There appears to be on the net a vocal group of people that aren’t happy with what they are doing (work wise or socially) who want to assume that others are feeling the same things and want to drag them into their misery (not directed at Albert). An example of this is the portrayal of a corporate job as a bad thing “the rat race”. Not anywhere universally true. Many people enjoy what they are doing. At all levels. The mailman that I have is a super happy guy at his ‘station’ in life. And probably happier then many people living a ‘higher purpose’ sophisticated life, say, in a big city.

    1. PhilipSugar

      We’ve discussed this before as JLM says there is nothing wrong with work being a defining part of your life. It’s why being a stay at home parent is so hardIt’s great to love work. You could say I’m working now instead of sitting on the beach where I am but I’d rather do this than sit oiled up on the beachNow I will say there are some that are just trying to make money and retire which is sad but maybe necessary if you don’t have the right skillsAnd there are some especially at big companies that say I’m busy busy busy but never really accomplish anything

      1. LE

        I don’t sit on the beach anymore (I did it recently when I was on vacation of course) and I rent my place down the shore out now although I am close enough where I live to drive there if I wanted to go on the beach. When I had it I would sit on the beach and then run to Starbucks for a coffee and to answer email. I was perfectly happy doing that. When I had a boat I would take that out so I didn’t have to deal with noise from others and the sand. [1] One of the things I used to like to do on a beach is read a book. But I don’t find enjoyment in that anymore since my reading habits have changed as a result of the internet to where books are less important to me because you only get the perspective and bias of the author.I can directly tie the thing that I am doing now and money that I have made to ignoring my first wife (and her family) whining about why I wasn’t with her and the kids at the pool on the weekends.My dad was happy to the day he died because he had his real estate and investments which he worked on everyday. When a tenant called and had a problem it was a reason for him to go downtown and meet the plumber and so on. His brain was active until the last days.[1] You know what “work” is? Taking friends out on a boat. They want to be entertained and you end up doing things that you would never do by yourself. Plus every guy who doesn’t own a boat sits next to you and asks the same questions that everyone else asked you before.

        1. Lawrence Brass

          Some people just don’t know how to enjoy doing nothing and relax, maybe that is your case. Of course being able to do so means that all your stuff must in order and the backlog is under control. I know people which just can’t do this even when on vacations. Do you like to travel or have long vacations?The italian “La Dolce Far Niente” represents this state of mind very well.https://www.psychologytoday

          1. LE

            The only time I would typically enjoy doing nothing is I was forced into a situation where I couldn’t do anything. A few examples:a) When I am on an airplane I find it enjoyable to not have to do anything and just sit there.b) I was at a funeral recently and thought “this is fine I am just sitting here and I am not doing anything and it’s not as bad as I thought it would be”Italians, to grossly generalize, are not exactly the model of a super productive motivated people so it doesn’t surprise me that that is a part of their culture. (Feel free for anyone to jump on me for that stereotype).Working relates to being in control. Being in control and accomplishing something relates to being relaxed.I never have long vacations. And a vacation for me is typically a beach resort without any particular agenda or schedule. I have also enjoyed going on a cruise from time to time but the problem with that is on port days you feel compelled to adhere to a schedule and take advantage of where you are.

          2. Lawrence Brass

            It is said that people that live in the north of Italy is more industrious than those who live in the south, but as you said those may be generalisations and stereotypes. A lot of cultural factors.I once worked with an entrepreneur that travels a lot, he was born in Jerusalem and lives in NY. He told me about the differences working in China, the US and South America. When he asked for a quote in the US he said, he would be in meetings for about two weeks before he could get something done. In Shenzhen he would ask for a quote on a Friday and have a quote plus working prototypes on Monday, the chinese would work through the weekend. In South America we could talk through for three weeks and accomplish nothing, but he said he had such a good time here. I guess we were the cheapest too.

          3. PhilipSugar

            I find it strange when people worry about others work habits. If it makes me happy to work on the weekend instead of doing nothing who cares?? Well maybe those who’s ass I’m kicking but it’s not a zero sum game

          4. Lawrence Brass

            I have many friends that do that and I don’t really worry as long as they are happy really. The important thing is exploring other possibilities in my opinion.

          5. LE

            Well maybe those who’s ass I’m kickingI think if you really boil it down, the “worry about it” it comes to that statement you made “might kick ass”.In the past if a man was working more than another man, it meant he had more of the spoils or could generate more luck. As such (and in theory I speculate not something that I read) it would be in his best interest to dissuade others from working so hard so as to preserve what he could get with his schedule and therefore level the playing field.One of the oddities of the world today is how most car dealers don’t work on Sundays. It’s as if they have all agreed as a group not to sell on that day. Now you could argue that if they did that they’d need all hands on deck at a high cost (service, finance, sales, management) but there is really little precedent for not solving those problems in today’s world (especially since it’s all toward mega dealers now and scale). Other businesses have no problem with this. The truth is they would sell more cars if they were open 2 weekend days instead of one. It’s an artifact of Sunday Blue laws and small dealerships.

      2. SubstrateUndertow

        If your employment role offers a meaningful mission, adequate resources/control and stable employment it is easier to love work.I just wonder what % of the world’s population lives inside that working environment ?

        1. PhilipSugar

          This is true. I do feel lucky. Although as LE says anybody can feel that way

      3. sigmaalgebra

        > It’s why being a stay at home parent is so hardHome school the kids. For some of how to do that, consult with a lot of experts in education and a lot of well educated and accomplished people.E.g., stimulate, foster, track each kid’s emotional, bonding, psychological, social, ethical, verbal, compassionate, empathetic, rational, artistic, athletic, literary, critical, political, scientific, economic development, curiosity, happiness, optimism, stability, etc.Should keep one busy enough doing “work worth doing”.

  10. LE

    As far as “not enough people working on climate change”, the lack of attention and knowledge given to other important problems which need to be solved is one of my pet peeves with the startup craze.All of these young motivated people who are needed to solve other important problems are being drawn into tech and startups. The same way that in the past smart kids went into medicine (because of the money). There is a brain drain in other areas of importance and unlike medicine (which had a ‘governor’, medical school and residency requirements) there is no similar situation in the new brass ring economy. Anyone can be a player no education even needed.By the way the salaries won’t last in CS long term. One of the reasons Zuckerberg just funded Andela [1] is certainly to increase the number of programmers and tech people in order to control and drive down wages in our country. I know on the surface it doesn’t look like that but that’s the motivating factor. Not saying it doesn’t have other benefits but there is a downside here. The demand might seem unlimited (like it did for lawyers at one point) but it’s not.“The idea is there’s a huge amount of human capital, of brain power, that doesn’t have a chance to really engage broadly, have the education or exposure needed to be able to live up to their potential,” he said. “In the next 10 years we want to find and create a platform for 100,000 genius-level software developers across Africa.” [1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9

    1. sigmaalgebra

      > genius-level software developersIs 100% made-up, up-chucked, deliberately deceptive, delusional, disgusting, despicable, destructive, manipulative, exploitative nonsense. It’s like in The Grapes of Wrath where CA owners of fruit orchards passed out handbills in OK saying how desperate CA growers were for labor to pick fruit.No way, not a chance, will be a “genius-level software developer” without some good education not easy to get alone or in a third world country. E.g., even if dream up how to calculate square root, no way will do that along with inventing heap sort, other uses of the heap data structure, AVL trees, red-black trees, k-D trees, the fast Fourier transform, locking in relational database, how to backup a relational database while it is actively reading, writing, and deleting, transactional integrity in relational database, error correcting codes, RSA public key encryption, Gauss elimination, the simplex algorithm, Lagrangian relaxation, the singular value decomposition, how to go automatically from Bachus-Naur form (BNF) to code for a parser and a parse tree, the Euclidean greatest common divisor algorithm, the Pythagorean theorem, etc. Not a chance. No one is that smart, or ever has been.But, now, routine software skills are quite common and, really, don’t pay very well. Really, just basic skills leads to a miserable job, due heavily to our open borders immigration system.The big bucks in information technology go mostly to the founders of successful startups. I.e., maybe be an employer but likely not an employee. There, hoping for financial success from just routine software is about like some sixth grader on the playground hoping to be Steph Curry — the odds are not good.Success is possible — and, really, there are relatively good, even historic, opportunities — but not via just trying to be a “genius software developer” without bringing a lot more of value to the effort.Okay, e.g., if want, maybe not “genius” stuff, but some comparatively bright stuff, for three months, from a server in production collect data 100 times a second on each of 15 numerical variables, and then in real-time continue to collect such data and in near real-time detect anomalies with known, adjustable false alarm rate. If have a good collection of anomalies, then also do that with a good approximation of the highest possible detection rate. How to do that? Or, commonly in production, it’s darned important to detect anomalies ASAP, but no one wants a lot of false alarms.Genius software? Artificial intelligence? Machine learning? Nope, not a chance.To do well with this, from just trying to be a “genius software developer”, first have to reinvent some mathematical statistics going back to K. Pearson about 100 years ago. To do more, have to reinvent some bright work of J. Neyman about 60 years ago. To do the rest, have to reinvent some work I did about 20 years ago — for that work, I can assure you, tough to find a chaired prof of computer science that can even read the solution, much less reinvent it.To reinvent that material, really need also to build on work of H. Lebesgue, A. Kolmogorov, G. Birkhoff, and others. Reinvent that prerequisite material? Not a chance! Heck, for that material, in a well written text, gotta be quite bright even to work the little exercises!To get the prerequisites, even in the world’s best research universities, have to be quite focused and selective.In reality, the search mentioned is not for geniuses but for suckers! Ah, back to Africa for more slave labor!

      1. LE

        You buried the lead. Next time you need to draw in readers by starting off with the paragraph you ended with.

    2. Susan Rubinsky

      Which is why the economic model must change which was pointed out.

  11. Guy Lepage

    Another great presentation by Albert. Really like his idea of community book building. Very cool concept.

  12. jason wright

    what’s next? Ethereum and The DAO filing for bankruptcy… probably.

  13. Erin

    Attention being the next scarcity is the observation of the century. Was he being influenced by philosopher Jacob Needleman? Although Needleman calls it a scarcity of time… close enough. They’re related. It’s how we manage our time that’s the battleground now. https://m.youtube.com/watch

  14. Dave Pinsen

    Watched this when Albert tweeted it. He is an impressively polished public speaker.

  15. Brandon Burns

    He had me until “technology has zero marginal cost.”This is a myth.No matter the service, adding more users means more server space and fixing bugs and developers to do it and customer service people and office space to house them and salaries to pay them and more costs on top of more costs, ad infinitum.If technology had zero marginal costs, investors would be out of a job, because the cost to grow a company would be zero.I’m seriously perplexed at the perpetuation of this myth by investors themselves. Of all folks, investors are the ones who know better!

  16. Susan Rubinsky

    I believe Huxley nailed it (#3 – Psychological Freedom) in Brave New World, circa 1932. There was an AVC post (sometime, somewhere in the past) about the 90/9/1 rule: 90% of people are Consumers, 9% of people are Curators (Influencers), 1% of people are Creators.What’s fascinating here is the (age old) question about economics. How many Creators and Curators can be set free by changing their economic status?

  17. Claire Belmont

    Interesting persepctive on technological (rev)evolution. A few thoughts:1) Information at zero marginal cost: agree it’s the case for those of us living in the developed world but doubt it’s true for those living in emerging markets where access to connectivity remains slow & expensive (I grew up in Kenya and travel Africa extensively).2) Basic income. I’m Swiss and I voted against, here’s why: a) no proposed financing plan, how do we expect governments (many already in debt) to cover these costs? Yes capital is available but it isn’t in the right hands… b) I’m also French and seeing what the 35h/week, a relatively high min wage, and high taxes did to the country does not make me believe people will be spending their additional attention/time on things that matter, it creates a society of assisted where everything is owed to them (or maybe I’m wrong and it’s cultural)… Net, the only place I could see universal basic income work is to bring the world’s poorest out of poverty (ref. the book Scarcity) but don’t believe it applies more broadly.3) Combing points 1 & 2: those that don’t (yet) have access to information at zero marginal cost are the most in need of basic income (i.e. the poor of emerging markets). So, start by addressing these points and because they’d leapfrog to a future model, I’d be curious to see what we could learn from them on “what’s next?” I’d rather that than debate endlessly and vote on UBI in countries that need it less.

  18. iggyfanlo

    Lord Acton: “Freedom is the distribution of power (money/basic income); Despotism is the concentration of it (Inequality of today)”…

  19. sigmaalgebra

    For the Julia Child books I have, 3-4 of them, from her first, famous one, Mastering, and later ones, I was screaming at the lack of temperature data.The beef stew I worked hardest on was exactly Boeuf Bourguignon from Child and, then, others, from Pepin, Diat, Escoffier, NYT, etc. All disasters until I discovered, a long way from any of those authors, the stuff about 160 F.What I got from Child was to “simmer” the pot with some intuitive descriptions of symptoms of what a simmer was, but with nothing on temperature, or to put the pot covered, in an oven, IIRC, at 350 F. That’s too darned high. Even 325 F is too darned high. Can get away with that sometimes if start with chuck roast because it has relatively little collagen. Try that with bottom round roast, and end up flushing it.Chuck roast? As part of my research, I wrote and/or called some beef industry group, and they just said to stew chuck roast.What always happened was that the pieces of beef — I’d been so careful with, time, money, and effort — turned out shrunken, hard, dry, black, and brittle. Why? Because the meat had gotten too far above 160 F for too long.Then the food chemistry sources explain that the proteins shrink, expel their water, and become hard, brittle, and dry. Yup, they do. Deposit the whole thing in the round bowl in the powder room, pull the chain, and order a pizza.I came to deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise every writer of beef stew I ever read. I wasted a LOT of really high quality beef, the best beef stock I could get, red wine, onions, carrots, mushrooms, etc. and time, money, and effort. A LOT. Off and on for years.Maybe now the editors of Child’s books have added the crucial temperature data, not just for baking a Genoise but simmering beef stew.Gotta tell you, if in the books I had they had said 160-165 F, that’s what the darned temperature would have been, just as accurately as anything I ever did in chemistry or physics lab. I have thermometers, good ones, lots of them. And, now I know that 160-165 F would have worked.Instead, from all those sources I got “simmer”, from the editors and publishers out to give me not information but vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE) with images of happy family gatherings, hearty, flavorful, fragrant, succulent, beef stew, etc. — right, after shopping and working for hours, flushing the results, and ordering pizza carryout. I was and remain pissed off.At times I wrote in public some of the angriest, nastiest denunciations and accusations of grotesque incompetence ever in the English language against some cabal of editors to make sure cookbooks were only for wasting time, money, and effort, flushing the results, and ordering pizza. I can’t believe those English major editors, who at most boiled water for some English tea, were influenced by what I wrote.Once Child and Pepin did a TV show on a beef stew, of course, omitted the crucial information about temperature, and I wrote in a denunciation accusing them of grotesque incompetence — maybe saying that those two couldn’t boil water successfully.I figured out the 160 F thingy, from some food chemistry materials, some high end Internet BBQ Web sites that were really, fully, 100% not fooling around serious, etc. with no English/Drama major editors ripping out the crucial information content and inserting their VEFEEE nonsense about romantic “simmering”. Child, Pepin, Diat, Escoffier, NYT, etc.? None of those. What a MESS.It’s been some years now, but remembering I can still get pissed again easily enough.

  20. sigmaalgebra

    I mentioned degrees F, C, or K because I am so darned desperate for accurate, crucial temperature data that I’d even take degrees K!Sure, I can believe all you wrote. And Child gave temperatures for baking. It’s well accepted that temperatures are crucial for baking. Yup.But I didn’t see Child, Pepin, Diat, Escoffier, NYT, etc. give temperatures for simmering beef stew. The 160 F I mentioned is just crucial, and I had to discover that far from any such cookbook authors.Also there is a big issue of temperature for Child’s Sauce Parisienne, that is, a velouté converted with egg yolks to a hot custard sauce and finished with soft butter and lemon juice. It can be darned good. But the sauce tends to separate unless served right after making. Child never mentioned temperature when handling the hot custard sauce. I still don’t have a good solution for that separation issue.Since Child, Pepin, etc., the sous vide people have made a very big deal out of very accurate and careful work with temperatures, especially for cooking meats, and rightly so.My big point is: If making beef stew from any of the less tender parts of the animal, then to tell someone to “simmer” the stew will almost surely result in temperatures significantly higher than 160 F and a disaster. For many decades, that’s been a disaster in nearly all more famous cookbooks in English. To heck with any mention of “simmer”. Instead, get the temperature up to 160 F and KEEP it RIGHT there until the dish is DONE.

  21. sigmaalgebra

    vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE)My description of the intended content of Engljsh majors who keep writing!

  22. Pointsandfigures

    Yes and No. I see your point and empathize with it. At the same time, I see the EITC. I also read The Conservative Heart by Arthur Brooks, and think about the themes in that. I think that Albert is a very thoughtful person. But, while I might agree on the end game, I might disagree with the means to get there. Cool think about Albert is he doesn’t hate me for having a different opinion.

  23. sigmaalgebra

    Yes, the custard sauce is terrific stuff.So, get some lightly flavored fish stock. Child suggests just cheat — use bottled clam juice. I always did.Put that in a heavy pot. Add some minced shallots — nice case of onion flavor. Maybe add some garlic — I don’t have my notes at hand. Add a few whole pepper corns (remove later).Add some dry, acidic, white wine. The obvious candidate, Macon, that is, the main area of growing Chardonnay in the southern part of the Burgundy region of France. A good Macon can be darned good; since not many people realize just what it is, typically the prices are low. Likely within a long tee shot is the famous Montrachet which is likely darned near the same thing and can really set you back. But drink it in a hurry because after about two years it will start to taste not so good — huge shame.You want the wine dry — that is no sugar. You especially want the acid to help make the whole dish bright. And the flavors of Macon are just about right, not too light or heavy.If I am using some bottled mushrooms, a better idea than it sounds, then I pour the liquid from the mushrooms into the pot. So, right, the pot has a court bouillon.Bring that to a “simmer” — don’t want a fast boil, do want to lightly cook the shallots, maybe want to get rid of some of the alcohol, but otherwise the temperature doesn’t much matter. We’re talking minutes here, maybe 10, not more than 30.Then, sure, get some fresh scallops and poach them in the pot. If the scallops are huge, then maybe divide each of them into 2-4 pieces. Mostly just under cook the scallops; keep testing them to see if they still look raw in their centers. When the outsides look cooked (dull instead of glossy) and the insides are threatening to get cooked, get the scallops OUT’A there, drain them, and, really set them in a bowl set in ice and cover the bowl so that air can’t dry out the scallops too much.Maybe boil down the court bouillon — I don’t have my notes! Then make a white roux, that is, just flour and butter, and add the court bouillon all at once. Whip rapidly — will get a thick batter. Add milk and whip. Will get a sauce. Add egg yolks and whip. Will get nice faint yellow color and a better texture. Add some whipping cream and get a still better sauce. Add some soft butter and will get a richer sauce. Add some lemon juice and get a brighter flavor. Add salt to taste.Now it’s good. Combine with the scallops and warm under a broiler — hope the sauce does not separate.Some people sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese on top to brown under the broiler — but that’s just decoration, not really a good addition to the flavor.A better strategy is to make thesauce one day ahead and keep. Then for the dish, warm the sauce, make a second court bouillon, poach the scallops, and right away combine the scallops and the sauce from the day before and serve.Keep that chain going!If use the sauce over poached sole, then get another famous dish.Once for my parents, I got some lump crab meat, bound it with a simple white sauce (Béchamel), wrapped in crepes, warmed in the oven, poured over the warm Parisienne sauce, and served it to my parents. It was good. At the end my usually very proper mother pulled over the nearly empty baking dish and used a finger to start the cleaning. So, it passed the KFC test!There are a lot of details in Child.Oops — you are in luck — I found my best old notes: Coquilles St. Jacques Parisienne3/11/78’Scallops Parisienne’ consists of scallops and mushrooms surrounded with a pale yellow sauce and served heated in small baking dishes.The scallops are poached in white wine and white stock. For the sauce, the poaching liquid is reduced, thickened with roux (flour and butter), thinned with milk, combined with egg yolks, cream, optionally some soft butter, and lemon juice.3 lbs. raw scallops, fresh or frozen (if frozen, no need to thaw before poaching), medium-to=large size 1.5-3.0 cm in diameter (they are roughly cylindrical)5 T minced shallotsLiquid from three 4 oz. cans fancy sliced mushrooms2 C French dry white Burgundy wine (Appellation Contrôlée, $1-3 per 24 oz, comes from near Mâcon and made from Pinot Chardonnay grapes)1 bay leaf1/3 turn on pepper mill (black pepper)8 oz bottled clam juice (or genuine fish stock)10 T sifted all purpose flour8 T butter (lightly salted or unsalted)1 1/2 C hot milk (or skim milk)1 C whipping cream4 egg yolks (USDA Grade A Large)juice of one lemondrained mushrooms from three 4 oz cans fancy sliced mushrooms6 oz grated Swiss cheesePlace first seven ingredients in a 6 qt. pot. Poach slowly once stock begins to simmer, continually test for doneness by cutting samples in half. Stop poaching while scallops are still translucent in center (outsides will be more white and opaque). Quickly strain and place solids (scallops and shallots), covered, in a stainless steel bowl set in ice water.Reduce stock rapidly but without scorching to 1 1/2 C (roughly 30 minutes). Add any liquid present with scallops-shallots to stock and reduce again to 1 1/2 C. Reduce heat to simmer.In a 3 quart pot, make roux of flour and butter and heat with slow bubbling for 60 seconds, stirring constantly with wooden spatula.Remove from heat and add simmering stock to hot roux all at once. Whip thoroughly and return to heat, whipping constantly reaching all parts of pot. Mixture will be stiff.Slowly blend in hot milk with constant whipping. Whip and bubble slowly till smooth and remove from heat.Use whip to mix cream and yolks in yolks in a 1 qt bowl. With constant whipping, slowly add roughly 1/3 of hot sauce, by tablespoons at first, to cream and yolks. Add cream-yolk-sauce in 1 qt bowl back to main sauce in 3 qt pot and whip until uniform. Add lemon juice, whip, and salt to taste.Drain the scallops-shallots, discarding any liquid remaining, dice scallops, add mushrooms, cutting any that are too large, moisten with roughly 1/3 of the sauce, distribute equally among eight 8-10 ounce shallow baking dishes, mounding mixture in center of dishes. Cover with remaining sauce then top with cheese (may wish to grate cheese directly over baking dishes).Place in plastic bags plump with air and tied at the top so that plastic does not touch sauce or cheese. Set in refrigerator until ready to eat (but not more than two days).Heat on a sheet of foil (to catch any overflow) in pre-heated 350 degree F oven until sauce bubbles around the edges, about 15 minutes.Serve with good French white Burgundy wine and French bread.Serves 8, large lunch dish, large supper first course, moderate supper main course.Calories: 640 per serving.Cost for entire recipe: Roughly $12 (marginal) or $18 (total).Modified at 00:15:28 on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009.Modified at 16:10:58 on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009.http://forums.egullet.org/i…Hi,I normally cook a sabayon to 180 degrees on high heat with rapid stirring before removing from the heat.Creme anglaise is normally cooked to 175 to 180 degrees.I’m not sure that egg yolks are fully cooked at 160 degrees. imho, sabayon based sauces normally begin to break because of undercooking. The break occurs when the sauce sits. This also fits the description of the separation in the first sauce.Overcooking breaks the sauce in a different way with the eggs turning hard and the fats and liquids rapidly separating.Modified at 02:40:06 on Sunday, September 13th, 2009.Just saw a Jacques and Julia episode on desserts where they did a sabayon and cooked the egg yolks, wine, and sugar and said that the right temperature is 180 F.Modified at 16:42:48 on Monday, September 21st, 2009.Last night did another trial:o Minced the shallots relatively finely. Seems to have released more flavor and make the shallot pieces less noticeable in the final dish, both of which are good.o Included two cloves of garlic, crushed, finely minced, along with the shallots in the court bouillon. Seems to be a good idea.o Poached to 160 F. Still an okay temperature.o When made the volute, DID bubble the roux for 45 seconds or so and DID cook the volute, with the reduced court bouillon and the milk, with constant whipping.Results: Texture was better than last time with too little cooking at that stage. So was flavor when last time actually didn’t cook out the “raw flour” taste.o When the final sauce was done, with egg yolks, salt, and lemon juice, in a 3 quart Farberware pot, did cook, with constant whipping, over medium high heat on a small burner, to 180 F as measured with meat thermometer.Results: Texture was better. Standing, sauce had texture of, say, a good vanilla pudding.Sauce was somewhat more stable although still not stable enough: Heating in microwave caused some of the sauce to start to separate and the rest to lose the nice, smooth, flowing texture and start to become ‘gloppy’.o Did final assembly in one of the usual serving dishes by putting the poached solids in a serving dish and heating in microwave for 2 minutes at 100% power. Did get some minor explosions.Result was hot enough. But, the scallops leaked liquid. So, if do this, then be sure to pour out the liquid before combining with the sauce.o Apparently scallops will leak liquid if warmed to a higher temperature than highest so far. So, likely and apparently, if poach to, say, 160 F and then heat to a higher temperature, then scallops will leak liquid.So far:o For reheating the sauce, do so with constant whipping.o For reheating the scallops, maybe use microwave or maybe just reheat in the sauce — with, say, constant folding.o Try heating the sauce to 190 F instead of 180 F.Modified at 23:06:51 on Monday, September 21st, 2009.Tried reheating the trial from yesterday:o Teflon Skillet. Tried reheating a mixture of the sauce and the solids in a Teflon skillet. Didn’t work well. Tough to get the mixture up to, say, 160 F with reasonable time and effort and without risking having the bottom of the skillet too hot.o Double Boiler. Tried reheating a mixture of the sauce and solids in a covered double boiler. Slow but it works. Reheat to 160 F over water at a moderately fast boil — faster than a simmer, slower than sending out a jet of steam.Next time, in an effort to minimize leaking from the scallops, put the sauce in the double boiler first and the solids second and on top of the sauce.There will be some separation of the sauce and, separately, some leaking from the scallops. Solution is just to mix gently with a rubber spatula.Then, with the pot contents nicely at 160 F and the sauce well mixed, the sauce looks very good, essentially as good as the original yesterday. That is, the sauce comes together well, is nicely uniform, and has nice texture.The 160 F is a good serving temperature IF eat QUICKLY.So, net, reheat in a double boiler.For next trial, cook the sauce to 190 F and see if that makes it more stable.