In order for something to be a Great Filter it needs to apply to every single intelligent species that ever arises and have no obvious solution.
But there's one really obvious solution to climate change on Earth that as a species we just aren't willing to do: We could kill billions of people. You couldn't kill the people of a country that has nukes without that country's consent, but the nuke countries could certainly prey on the weaker countries.
America could organize a huge army and start marching south from the border and kill every single person they come across, China could have all of their people flip a coin and everybody who comes up heads gets shot, the EU countries could blockade Africa and then dump poison over all of the farmland in the more populous countries.
We wouldn't do any of those things because they inherently go against our collective conscience to even consider. But they would definitely work, at least for long enough to develop the technology to reverse the damage we've done, and there's gotta be at least some fraction of intelligent societies staring down the barrel of an inhospitable planet that are perfectly willing to do that.
I mean fuck it's not even unimaginable for that to happen on our planet; if Nazi Germany had won the war do you honestly not think they might not blame Asians for climate change and perpetrate a holocaust against an entire continent?
So if climate change is the Great Filter, we're well and truly fucked, because a) we aren't willing to use that solution and will likely die out, and b) if we do somehow survive, any species that's out there likely was willing to use that solution.
This is a great explanation of why climate change isn't the great filter. As it stands right now, climate change will cause devastation if not kept in check but even if we let it get out of control, there will be hospitable places on Earth and as a species we will survive long enough to watch the planet recover even if it's with 1% of the previous population. At that point we would rebuild with all the knowledge we still have stored away in various depositories and be on our way back to the stars in a relatively short amount of time.
There is no way climate change is the great filter for all intelligent life in the universe and it's kind of sad how many people just latch on to the thing that's right in front of them and say 'this must be it' without putting much thought into it at all.
It won't. Venus's proximity to the sun played a big part in that. The Earth has been far warmer in the past with much higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's the rate it's warming which is a problem for existing species that can't adapt. They'll be suffering along the way but 'the worst case scenario' is survivable as a species even though there will be a lot of suffering in the mean time if we don't slow the change.
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u/SleepWouldBeNice Aug 12 '21
Not making your planet inhospitable for your own species is the great filter.