An easy climate change / energy quiz

Here is a simple, fun, 10 question quiz that covers a sample of climate change and/or energy issues.   Simply check the appropriate box and push the “vote” button for each question.  After you have pushed the vote button you will see the accumulated wisdom of everybody who has answered that question so far.  You can even leave a comment for any question, which I encourage.

Note that several of the questions requiring numerical answers have “order of magnitude” choices.   That is, they require “back of the envelope” type approximations, not high precision.

At the bottom of the quiz you will find a link to a solutions page, with links to supporting evidence, and “back of the envelope” calculations.  If you want, you can look at the solutions first and then take the quiz – but that would be cheating!

After enough people have answered the questions I will post the results at ClimateSanity.

Have fun!

 QUESTION 1. 

 Here are five false color images of the sea ice in the arctic.  The images represent the ice on five year intervals on July 18th of 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, and 2008.  Your task is to use your knowledge of changing conditions in the Arctic to put them in the proper chronological order.  Note that each image uses the same color scale (shown in the upper left corner of each image) to indicate the density of ice as a function of position. 

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Image 4

Image 5

 

Question 2

 

Question 3

In the fall of 2007, after the northern summer melt season, the Arctic sea ice extent anomaly reached its lowest level since satellite monitoring began in 1979.  This was followed by warnings that the Arctic ice could be completely gone by the summer of 2012. 

 

Question 4

In 1979 the worst nuclear accident in US history happened at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. 

 

Question 5

A rising sea level is one of the feared symptoms of global warming.  According to the Jason and Topax satellite tracking of ocean levels, the average sea level rise rate for the last 10 years has been about 3.2 mm per year.  This is interpreted by some to indicate an accelerating sea level rise rate.  IPCC expert Simon Holgate’s 2004 data (Holgate, S.J., and P.L. Woodworth, 2004: Evidence for enhanced coastal sea level rise during the 1990s. Geophys. Res. Lett., 31, L07305, doi:10.1029/2004GL019626.) was prominently featured in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (AR4, Working Group 1: The Physical Science Basis of Climate change, Chapter 5).  In a more recent 2007 paper (S.J. Holgate, “On decadal rates of sea level change during the twentieth century“, Geophysical Research Letters34: GL019626 (2007)., Holgate reconstructed sea level rise rates from high quality tidal gauge data going back to about 1900.

 

Question 6

NASA Scientist James Hansen estimated a sea level rise of 15 feet for the 21st century.

 

Question 7

The northern coast of Greenland is at 83.5 degrees north latitude.  It is the closest land to the North Pole.  Satellite data since 1979 has always shown this region locked in sea ice.  If global warming were to result in an ice free arctic sometime during this century, it is believed that this area would be the last place to lose its summer ice.

 

Question 8

Compact fluorescent light bulbs use only 25% of the energy of an incandescent light bulb to give the same number of lumens of light.

 

Question 9

 

Question 10

Since 1963 Africa’s Lake Chad has experienced severe shrinkage.  While atmospheric CO2 levels have continuously increased since 1963, the surface area of the lake has dropped from about 25,000 square kilometers to about 1,500 square kilometers.  This fact has been presented by Al Gore and others as a consequence of anthropogenically induced global warming.  Of course, this evidence must be considered in comparison to how the lake was changing when CO2 levels were not increasing. 

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***Click here for quiz solutions***

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