Health warning: if you know anything about science and are eating or drinking whilst reading this, please swallow now as the following statement may cause you to choke on your cornflakes.
Carbon dioxide: invisible, odourless, and certainly not weightless. Image: Wikipedia Benji9072
Tony Abbott, opposition leader and potential future Prime Minister, answering a question about how CO2 emissions are calculated:
“It’s actually pretty hard to do this because carbon dioxide is invisible and it’s weightless and you can’t smell it.” – The Age
I think that might be the worst science I’ve heard an Aussie politician say in a while. Can you imagine measuring a gas by smell? I’m picturing someone with their nose over a smoke stack, sniffing and saying “40,000 parts per million” before passing out. I’ve never studied how they measure carbon dioxide emissions, and it might be tricky to quantify, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that there we already have ways of measuring it that don’t involve smell or visibility.
I’m pretty sure people had discovered invisible gases long before Tony Abbott went to school (I’m picturing 1800s Victorian gas street lamps).
Methane is also an invisible, odourless gas that is a potent greenhouse gas. It’s the gas that runs your stove and gas heater, so I really hope someone at the gas company has a way of detecting it.
Orbiting Carbon Observatory. Image: http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/
Obviously atmospheric carbon dioxide detection is going to be a bit more sophisticated than that. So I’ve quickly Googled it. Oh look, CSIRO was detecting atmospheric CO2 waaay back in 1972. Fancy that! [Malcolm Turnbull recently made the radical suggestion politicians should listen to CSIRO rather than Lord Monckton.] These days NASA even has fancy newfangled satellites that measure CO2 in the atmosphere.
And don’t even get me started on the idea that CO2 is weightless. Weightless! A high school chemistry/physics student should be able to refute that one. Weight is the name given to the force on an object due to gravity. However, if Tony Abbott doesn’t know the difference between weight and mass, and is using ‘weight’ colloquially to mean ‘mass’ – then the molar mass of CO2 is 44.01 grams per mole. He’s very wrong either way.
So is Tony Abbott obfuscating gravity and Newtonian physics, or basic chemistry? What next?
Thanks to ABC’s Annabel Crabb, where I saw this quote, here and here.
Update: The above quote I got came originally from The Age who said it came from Tony Abbott talking to group of workers in their lunch room at a South Dandenong engine factory. However, when I was checking the origins of this quote, someone talking about this issue referenced a radio transcript on the Liberal Party website with a quote that’s almost the same, so presumably he said a similar thing on two different occasions:
JOHN LAWS:
And imagine the administration costs of doing that? What’s the point of it if you take it away with one hand and give it back with the other?
TONY ABBOTT:
Exactly right. Even if they were trying to give it all back to you, there would still be the deadweight costs, all the extra bureaucrats. See, one of the things that people haven’t quite twigged to is that carbon dioxide is invisible, it’s weightless and it’s odourless. How are we going to police these emissions…
JOHN LAWS:
I don’t know.
TONYABBOTT:
…I mean, how are we going to police these emissions? This carbon cop is going to be an extraordinarily intrusive instrumentality, running around trying to make sure that all these businesses aren’t actually emitting given that you can’t actually see, smell or touch what’s going on.
We can’t see, smell or touch those radio waves, but unfortunately we can still detect them…
Saying something like that once when put on the spot is silly (or for an outrageous suggestion, if you don’t know the answer to something scientific, say “I don’t know”), but accidents happen, and you go away and look up the correct answer to the question so you’re not caught out again. But saying it a second time!?!
Random anon
25/07/2011
I bet he thinks methane causes smelly farts.
wombat
26/07/2011
I bet he was one of those annoying kids who sat up the back in class and shouted out “booooriiiiing” and “we don’t NEED to know this crap” etc. Those idiots are so busy bellowing they never learn anything.
Clancy James
26/07/2011
What exactly was the “this” he was referring to? I can guess [measuring carbon emissions] but just wanted to check it wasn’t “create a perfume”.
Mags
29/07/2011
“See, one of the things that people haven’t quite twigged to is that carbon dioxide is invisible, it’s weightless and it’s odourless.”
I see he’s never visited a science classroom on his school visits then huh?
sansscience
29/07/2011
What I think is really funny is it looks like he hasn’t quite twigged his own party’s policies: “… direct action measures that will reduce CO2 emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 based on 1990 levels …”
http://www.liberal.org.au/~/media/Files/Policies%20and%20Media/Environment/The%20Coalitions%20Direct%20Action%20Plan%20Policy%20Web.ashx
How are they going to measure the invisible and odourless carbon sequestration? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I would have thought measuring the amount of CO2 put out by a chemical process, like making steel in a factory, would be if anything easier than calculating carbon sequestration in soils, which would have far more natural variables?
stace8383
29/07/2011
Well, that’s highly disturbing. Whilst I don’t expect politicians to be experts on everything, I do not like the idea of such a highly-placed politician being so utterly clueless about a major current issue.
Geez
29/07/2011
And your point is?
Australia’s emissions are ~0.18ppm. A 5% reduction by 2020 is 0.009ppm at a cost equivalent to $13 trillion per 1ppm. Good deal eh?!
sansscience
29/07/2011
I don’t know if your numbers are correct (perhaps you could provide a link to your source?). But whether or not Labour’s ETS 5% target is a “good deal” (which I’ve never taken a position either for or against) is irrelevant to the issues in this article. Both Labour and Tony Abbott’s Liberal party have the exact same 5% reduction target. It’s about the basic science of how they’re able to measure these reductions being completely and repeatedly portrayed wrongly.
TheSnitzel
30/07/2011
i think when tony said it had no weight he actually meant metophorical political weight as in the argument has no basis
sansscience
31/07/2011
Reddit has comments on this story.
Graham
03/08/2011
Yeah, he’s right. For all practical purposes, gaseous carbon dioxide is weightless on earth. Sure, it isn’t massless, but it is weightless. He’s actually got his physics right, unlike all you experts that think you know it all but actually don’t.
sansscience
03/08/2011
1) “For all practical purposes” CO2 is heavier than air, and assuming otherwise could be a fatal mistake.
Since CO2 is heavier than air, if you’re in a confined space with leaking CO2 then the denser CO2 will displace the lighter air and you could die of asphyxiation. An example of a recent death here.
In a far worse example of this, 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock died of suffocation when CO2 was released from Lake Nyos, Cameroon, in 1986. The large amount of CO2 filled the valleys below, displacing the lighter air, and suffocating everyone in its path.
2) If you’re going to credit Tony Abbot with knowing the difference between weight and mass: Tony Abbott was talking about detecting CO2, and for that “practical purpose” its mass is very important, whereas its weight isn’t. There are various different ways of detecting CO2, but the one that I use is a mass spectrometer. The machine uses the mass of the gases to measure the amount CO2 in a sample of air.
Tim S
09/02/2012
As the other reply indicated, CO2 is a little heavier (mass / weight, either way) than air, causing dangerous zones in the bottom of caves with poor ventilation and CO2 sources, excess CO2 (lack of oxygen) will make people sleepy, so the un-aware spelunker will lie down for a nice rest, only to die a gentle hypoxic death. Also see ‘pouring CO2′ experiments, where you can capture it in a vessel (say a jug) and pour it over candles to put them out, I think Richard Wiseman has some on youtube.
In the atmosphere there’s enough agitation that the CO2 doesn’t settle out so for some practical purposes you’re right, but there are some situations where the difference is critical.