March 9 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s plan to charge for greenhouse-gas emissions and use the revenue to trim taxes might be wise if the planet were truly warming, economist Ross McKitrick told a group of climate-change skeptics today.

A “truth-based” system to limit heat-trapping gases only if warming is scientifically confirmed might satisfy both sides of the debate, the associate professor of economics at Canada´s University of Guelph said at a conference in New York. The U.S. president has proposed rolling back emissions to 1990 levels regardless of the extent of higher global temperatures.

At a three-day event billed as the biggest meeting of global-warming skeptics, McKitrick and colleagues are challenging the accuracy of long-range climate forecasts and published theory on the extent of warming as their contrarian views are shunned by corporate and political leaders, from the president to the head of U.S. utility Public Service Enterprise Group.

“Global warmers,” said McKitrick, should “love a truth- based system. We might get a rapidly shrinking cap and rapidly rising permit price. But we might not.”

A cap on emissions and a requirement that industrial polluters own permits to release greenhouse gases are cornerstones of the Obama plan. The proposals sparked new criticism today at the event entitled “Global Warming, Was it Ever Really a Crisis?”

UN Conference Begins

The meeting of 600 attendees ends tomorrow as a United Nations-sponsored conference begins in Copenhagen on the science of global warming, drawing together about 2,000 scientists, politicians and economists of a different stripe. UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon will meet with Obama and members of Congress in Washington tomorrow to urge stronger action to fight climate change.

UN-led scientists blamed emissions from carbon-based fuels with “90 percent certainty” for rising temperatures and sea levels in a 2007 report. That view has been embraced by many of the 192 governments that are meeting this month in Bonn to forge a new treaty to stem climate change.

“What they’re trying to do is introduce doubt,” said David Hawkins, director of the climate center at the environmental advocate Natural Resource Defense Council in New York. “They want this to be covered in the press as though there’s some fight within the scientific community.”

Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described the challenges facing contrarians yesterday at a dinner opening the conference.

Uphill Battle

“Global warming alarm has always been a political movement, and opposing it has always been an uphill battle,” Lindzen said. Scientists who endorse global warming are “richly rewarded for doing so,” he said.

Roy Spencer, author of the book “Climate Confusion,” argues that nature’s variations are warming the planet more than man’s burning of fossil fuels in cars and power plants. The University of Alabama meteorologist, in published research, has said cyclical Pacific Ocean currents interacting with the atmosphere explain most global temperature changes in the last century.

Spencer, a former National Aeronautics and Space Administration employee who speaks tomorrow at the conference, says publicity and respect for a contrarian view is scarce.

“Somebody has finally taken a few minutes to understand what I’m talking about,” Spencer, 53, said in an interview about receiving a supportive e-mail from a “mainstream scientist” on his work. “This is great!”

Published Evidence

The skeptics contradict thousands of pages of published, peer-reviewed studies that link melting ice caps, more severe droughts and higher sea levels to manmade global warming.

That science is behind Obama’s proposed cap-and-trade program, which would charge for permits to pump carbon dioxide into the skies, generating an estimated $645.7 billion through 2019, according to the budget he proposed last month. The funds would be used to invest in “clean” energy, help finance a tax credit for workers and offset higher energy costs for low-and middle-income people.

Over the last 150 years, the average global temperature has risen by 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and by more than twice that in the Arctic, eroding edges of the polar ice cap, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Heat-trapping emissions must drop by 50 percent by 2050 to avert the worst effects of climate change.

Fundamental Science

“The fundamental science is accurate and therefore quite predictive of the kinds of things we’re seeing, and that worries me in a big, big way,” Ralph Izzo, chief executive officer of Newark, New Jersey utility Public Service, said in an interview. “Isn’t it prudent risk management to start taking steps?”

Eric Pooley, a Kalb Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says society has moved on from scientific debate, which was made difficult by the pace of warming.

“Climate change is slow and gradual, at least for now, unfolding on a time scale that confounds the capacities of our politics, our economics, and our journalism,” Pooley wrote last year in a paper entitled “How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet?”

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Last Updated: March 9, 2009 14:48 EDT