Do We Really Have Only 3 to 5 Years Left on Earth? Here’s What Climate Scientists, Reports Tell Us

A week ago, in an emotional speech in Los Angeles, Peter Kalmus, a NASA scientist, demanded the public listen to the desperate cautions of climate change experts.

In the YouTube video indicating that this planet only has three to five years left, and as reported in the Independent via MSN, the scientist is seen saying, "We're going to lose everything." He added that they're not joking nor lying and not even exaggerating.

Kalmus, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, was participating in a protest that the Scientist Rebellion organized as part of a global day of action by scientists worldwide. His protest in Los Angeles involved scientists chaining themselves to the doors of the JPMorgan Chase building.

A NASA scientist was arrested for locking himself onto a Chase Bank in L.A. alongside other members of the Scientist Rebellion.

AJ+ spoke with @ClimateHuman in a personal capacity about his arrest in the fight for climate justice. pic.twitter.com/b1EeFdN7l0
— AJ+ (@ajplus) April 15, 2022

Commenting on his participation at the said protest, he said he was there at the event because "scientists are not being listened to" and is willing to take a risk for Earth, which he called the "gorgeous planet."

While chained to the door, the scientist started to cry as he also said he was there for the protest for his sons, elaborating, "this is all for the kids of the world," so much bigger than any of those from today's generation.

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(Photo: TOLGA AKMEN/AFP via Getty Images)
An activist from the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion (XR), with their hand glued to the window, demonstrates outside of Britain's Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy in central London on April 13, 2022, as part of a series of actions aiming to stop the fossil fuel economy.

The Earth's Natural Systems by 2040

This is not the first time that scientists and environmentalists are urging the public to act to save the planet. In 2018, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported scientists' predictions of how long the world would last.

Specifically, the NRDC said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC released a chilling report that has sent most people into "a deep funk."

In it, around 90 climate scientists from 40 nations concluded that "if humans don't take immediate, collective actions" to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040, the results would effectively be baked into the planet's natural systems.

In an NRDC update, just last week, the IPCC released the Working Group III Sixth Assessment report on climate change mitigation. This report detailed how countries are falling too short of decreasing climate pollution fast enough to prevent serious damage, upheaval, and cost amidst gains in the clean energy revolution.

With a lot of heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere, there will be no turning back in effect. The extreme droughts, massive floods, devastating wildfires, widespread famines, and deadly hurricanes that are seen more and more of these days will "cease to be statistical anomalies" and rather be more like seasonal markers, as specified in the report, as regular as the leaves changing.

1,000-Year Deadline

In 2017, Elle came out with a report indicating what English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had to say about the fate of humanity on this planet.

In November of that same year, Hawking, living with Lou Gerig's Disease, revealed his prediction regarding the deadline of humankind on Earth and how long humans have until there comes the need to search for a "new planet to call home."

At that time, Gerig predicted that there would be a "solid 1,000 years." Now, 1,000 years as the deadline for life's existence on Earth does not precisely sound quite threatening if the world starts acting to save the world from climate change and pollution.