Carbon trading and Apocalyptic conditions

There's been some discussion going on about global warming.

A friend remarked that carbon trading, in his opinion, is a farce, a global tax hike to reduce government debt after "years of uncontrolled spending." He sees the current Labor government as mainly to blame.

I responded that I believe carbon trading to be a farce, but not for the reasons he suggests. I see it as a licence for big polluters to keep polluting, which also shifts responsibility from the polluting companies to the third world where carbon sinks are cheap.

However, I can't see that carbon taxes have anything to do with tax hikes as a revenue-raising technique, particularly as they were mooted back when Australia was making quite a bit out of the mining boom, before the Global Financial Crisis struck. And, even if I expect these measures to be ineffective and more a sop to businesses than a genuine solution, surely they have everything to do with trying to ensure that we have a world fit to occupy when our children and grandchildren are trying to live their lives.

I told my friend that there is little hope of getting the developing world on board unless we are willing to take the first steps.

He then responded that climate change might be a natural earth cycle that nothing man does changes.

I can't see that that changes anything in terms of our response. Even if there is an underlying natural cycle, since industrialisation we have been pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates.

The problem now is that the world is entering a positive feedback cycle where greenhouse conditions run out of control. It’s the old Coke in the sun thing: heat a bottle of soft drink, and the gas comes out of solution. The same thing happens to greenhouse gases dissolved in ocean water or trapped in peat bogs and northern tundra. The hotter these get, the more carbon dioxide and othr gases are expelled and re-enter the atmosphere.
So, even if there is a natural cycle, what we do is now pushing it over the edge. We risk a run-away event.

All these things remind me of the plagues (desertification, locusts, run-away heat) in Revelation: people still didn’t repent, even when they saw others succumb.

Isn’t that human, and isn’t that happening now?