Exploding Earth

Question

I have always heard that the Earth, due to its structure, cannot explode. Now, I'm quite fascinated by astronomy physics but I admit I only hold some more than basic knowledge.

In any case, even though I have interiorized this concept, I have no basis to prove it. If you search on the internet, you get both theories (No it won't vs yes it will), so you understand that even if one is the current accepted theory, I'm not sure I know why it is the case.

Considering this, what concrete reasons can we bring forward in its favour? And why?

Answer 1

The page to which you linked suggests that the Earth will explode due to global warming. What about Venus? Not only is it closer to the sun, but its greenhouse effect is an order of magnitude stronger than ours. Yet Venus has not exploded.

The page also suggests that the Earth's core is some kind of nuclear reactor. It can't be a fusion reactor because the Earth is not massive enough to start fusing hydrogen like our Sun does. There is some fission happening in the Earth's core, but it's decreasing as the radioactive elements are depleted, and the planet is generally cooling as time progresses.

The heat energy contribution from the sun has virtually no effect on the internal temperature of the planet. And even if some of the fissionable material in the earth's core somehow condenses into a critical mass, the explosion would probably not be felt on the planet's surface. It would take a ridiculous amount of fissionable material to literally "blow apart" the planet; much more than actually exists inside of it.

Answer 2

Aside from the fact that the Earth's core isn't a fission reactor...

and aside from that fact that increasing temperature of a fission reactor will decrease its power, as opposed to increasing it as implied by the link, "Overheating of the fission heated planetary interior"...

and aside from the fact that more volcanic activity would eventually cool the Earth's core as opposed to heating it (possibly implied by the link, hard to be sure)...

What I want to know is how global warming has anything to do with the temperature of the core of the Earth on these scales. Let's look at temperature and then heat capacity:

Temperature: The IPCC scenarios see surface temperature rising by maybe $12 K$ at the most. The temperature of the center of the Earth is around $7500 K$. Even if the change from AWG propagated instantly, at most it would increase the temperature of the center of the Earth by those 12 degrees. Not to mention that higher temperature tends to increase heat transfer coefficients as opposed to decrease them. Even in the worst case scenario, what effect should increasing the center of the Earth to $7512 K$ actually have?

• Considering that that temperature has been steadily declining for billions of years
• Considering that it would have less nuclear fuel today than at any time in the past

We probably don't have anything to worry about.

Heat capacity: I can do a very very general ballpark estimate of how long it will take a rock the size of Earth to warm up 12 degrees due to an increase in insulation of about 4 W/m^2, which is what we get from global warming. I get around 250 million years. Everything in the link argues with data from 1970 to today. While many of the link's claims can be called junk science, this flaw is so horrendously bad that I wouldn't even call it that. I would say it's more of a flagrant rejection of reality.

Let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that volcanic activity and earthquake strength actually has increased in the last 100 years. The link offers no plausible chain of reasoning to explain it.