I feel like a ton of C02 at air pressure should be bigger.
I know it's correct, but it looks like the amount of exhaust produced by a car idling for a few minutes, at a visceral level you just expect a literal tonne of gas to take up more volume.
People tend to end up dead within seconds of entering any kind of oxygen-free atmosphere. People who follow them in to attempt a rescue without a tank of air generally end up dead as well, creating a whole chain of dead.
At standard temperature and pressure (STP) it looks like CO2 has a density of 1.96 kg/m^3. 1 tonne = 1000 kg, so a tonne of CO2 has a volume of (1000 kg)/(1.96 kg/m^3) = 510 m^3 at STP. A cube of that volume would have side length (510 m3)(1/3) = 7.99 m, so roughly 8 meters per side.
I don't know how tall that person is, but if we assume around 1.6 m (5' 3") then the cube side length should be about 5 of her. Seems pretty accurate to me.
Not sure it actually demonstrates the extend of the issue. My favourite way to look at it (via ThunderF00t@youtube I believe):
dry ice is essentially frozen CO2 ( CO2 in solid form)
cca 40 billion tuns per year (cca 5t per person / year, 8 billion people)
1km side cube of dry ice weights cca 1.5 billion tuns (1.560 kg/m3 says wiki)
=> Burj Khalifa has 830 m - imagine huge cube of dry ice 20% taller ( or 3x eifell tower)- all that CO2 boiling off in massive clouds - than add 25 of them - each year. We've been doing this at some scale for decades....
I guess I'm confused on the definition of a "tonne" of CO2. Am I to believe that if that cube was completely full of CO2 that volume of CO2 would weigh 1000kg?
Nevermind, just looked it up. It's actually a measure of volume, just 1000 cubic meters, which makes perfect sense.
Edit: it was actually the first one, although a "tonne" as a measure of volume does exist.