Carbon tax tied to Earth temperature might chastise doomsayers, convince deniers

What if there was a way to make happy all those involved in the global warming debate? McKitrick, who wrote  Taken By Storm, a book that falls on the skeptical side in the global warming debate, has an interesting proposal. “Put up, or shut up!” In a turn that would surprise many of his admirers, who would not want to hear much about curbing carbon emissions through financial penalties, proposes a carbon tax. With a twist. The carbon tax should be proportional with temperature increases. If skeptics are right, the tax will be a pinprick. If they are wrong, penalties will increase dramatically and directly proportial with the future developments, leaving no doubt as to what is at stake.

Dr. McKitrick proposes calling each side’s bluff. He suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.

If the skeptics are right and the earth isn’t warming, then the penalties for burning carbon would stay small or maybe even disappear. But if the climate modelers and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct about the atmosphere heating up, then the penalties would quickly, and automatically, rise.

“Either way we get a sensible outcome,” Dr. McKitrick argues. “The only people who lose will be those whose positions were disingenuous, such as opponents of greenhouse policy who claim to be skeptical while privately believing greenhouse warming is a crisis, or proponents of greenhouse gas emission cuts who neither understand nor believe the I.P.C.C. projections, but invoke them as a convenient argument on behalf of policies they want on other grounds even if global warming turns out to be untrue.”

via Findings – Trusting Nature as the Climate Referee – NYTimes.com.