Mass Destruction
A letter in the Sydney Morning Herald smugly declares:
If you read The Australian, you'd know:By this reckoning, Tony's a lightweight
A few nights ago I heard Tony Abbott describe carbon dioxide as an ''invisible, odourless, weightless, tasteless substance''. A letter in the Herald on Saturday confirmed this. According to my chemistry, carbon dioxide is not weightless: 22.4 litres of it has a mass of approximately 44 grams. If Mr Abbott can get such basic chemistry wrong, how can we trust him on climatology - it being an infinitely more complex matter? By the way, no gas on earth is weightless.
Damien McCrudden Toongabbie
CO2 in the atmosphere has mass but is as weightless as astronauts in space.There's a whole Wikipedia entry on Mass versus Weight which notes:Don Catchpoole, Apple Tree Flat, NSW
In everyday usage, the mass of an object is often referred to as its weight though these are in fact different concepts and quantitiesAccording to my chemistry, Mr McCrudden's chemistry, and the SMH is (ahem) massively wrong.
Labels: SMH
posted by Dan at 6:40 AM |
3 Comments:
Sounds a bit like our beloved helmswoman - colourless and tasteless. Don'tknow about odourless though.
Simple test. Drop a balloon filled with 1kg of C02 on your foot followed by 1kg brick of carbon and tell me which one hurts more.
I guess he means 22.4l at sea level... If AGW-sea levels rose by 100m, what would 22.4l of CO2 weigh then, smarty?
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