HOPE enhagen

It's a big week for international climate action. World Leaders, scientists, and activists are gathering in Copenhagen to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto treaty.

Here is a link to information on the climate summit from The Guardian.

And from the New York Times.

To keep our minds on the subject, below is a questionnaire from the Wall Street Journal sent to me by my brother Don. How is your climate literacy?

Listen up when reporting about this climate summit comes on the news this week. Don't turn that dial on the radio as you cruise around in your car! It is important that we all be educated on this subject. The President of the United States is attending. There has been a shift in attention and world leaders finally are paying attention.

Now for the quiz.

1. Household appliances and electric gadgets suck up lots of energy in standby mode just to keep the clock on and the machine ready to go at a moment's notice. In rough terms, the amount of electricity wasted that way in the U.S. each year is equivalent to the output of:

A. 0.8 nuclear power plants
B. 1.8 nuclear power plants
C. 8 nuclear power plants
D. 18 nuclear power plants

ANSWER: D. Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate as much as 10% of U.S. residential electricity use is lost in "standby power." That's about one-sixth of all the power produced by the 104-strong fleet of nuclear reactors in the U.S.

2. Worries about how to curb man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are now a driving force behind economic and foreign policy world-wide, as the current Copenhagen climate-change summit demonstrates, but how did it all get started? Who first described a link between man-made emissions, a greenhouse effect and rising global temperatures?

A. Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)
B. John Tyndall (1820-1893)
C. Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)
D. Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927)
E. Al Gore (1948- )

ANSWER: D. Fourier first proposed the idea of a "greenhouse effect." Tyndall first proved it was real, and the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the U.K. is named after him. But Arrhenius was the first to link industrial activity, especially burning coal, to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—and to rising temperatures, though he initially expected that effect would take a few thousand years.

3. When it comes to emissions of greenhouse gases, most people know the biggest culprits: China and the U.S. Which three countries round out the top five?

A. Brazil
B. Mexico
C. South Korea
D. India
E. South Africa
F. Russia
G. Indonesia
H. Japan

ANSWER: G, A and D. Indonesia and Brazil have zoomed up the rankings due to the inclusion of tropical deforestation—not just industrial activity—in the tally. That's one reason people from investment bankers to think-tank types are becoming tree huggers: Preventing deforestation is seen as a relatively easy and cheap way to tackle a huge chunk of global emissions, though questions loom on enforcing forest-protection plans in remote places.