Hey Yoram,

Thanks for coming to USF last night. I really enjoyed your routine (the part I saw, at least).

So, it was my son who broke out into hysterical laughter and temporarily halted your routine when you started joking about China last night (at USF). He loves Pandas, so he gets really excited about China since that is where they come from. I’m sorry if it interrupted your routine, but I think the crowd though it was pretty funny. It looked like you took the interruption in stride, so I hope you didn’t mind too much.

He is the class clown in his preschool class and loves attention. As such, when he laughed really loud (by realizing you were talking about Pandaland, as he refers to China), he immediately learned the crowd thought it was funny, and promptly told me he was going to “laugh louder than anyone” after every joke. Once is funny, but after every joke would have been distracting, so I decided to take him outside. So you can sleep well tonight knowing that no domestic violence resulted from your routine, and also because you inspired my little comedian to try and be funny like you.

My wife and I thought it was hilarious. I hope you did too. [YB: Oh yes I did!] She and I were still laughing about even this morning. I am attaching some pictures of your littlest fan, just in case you are interested – one of him trying his hardest to be funny, and the other with Pandas.

The paper is currently under peer review. Here’s the abstract:

The small but stubbornly unyielding possibility of a very large long-term response of global temperature to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be termed the fat tail of high climate sensitivity. Recent economic analyses suggest that the fat tail should dominate a rational policy strategy if the damages associated with such high temperatures are large enough. The conclusions of such analyses, however, depend on how economic growth, temperature changes, and climate damages unfold and interact over time. In this paper we focus on the role of two robust physical properties of the climate system: the enormous thermal inertia of the ocean, and the long timescales associated with high climate sensitivity. Economic models that include a climate component, and particularly those that focus on the tails of the probability distributions, should properly represent the physics of this slow response to high climate sensitivity, including the correlated uncertainty between present forcing and climate sensitivity, and the global energetics of the present climate state. If climate sensitivity in fact proves to be high, these considerations prevent the high temperatures in the fat tail from being reached for many centuries. A failure to include these factors risks distorting the resulting economic analyses. For example, we conclude that fat-tail considerations will not strongly influence economic analyses when these analyses follow the common—albeit controversial—practices of assigning large damages only to outcomes with very high temperature changes and of assuming a significant baseline level of economic growth.