Here are today’s two quiz questions taken from the Wall Street Journal’s environmental knowledge test. Previous Green IQ posts can be found here.

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. (Editor’s note: we at 2nd Green Revolution thought this was astounding). 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.

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.