Climate Change
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145 free Climate Change trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free climate change trivia questions with answers. Think you know everything about climate change? Put your environmental knowledge to the test with our comprehensive climate change trivia quiz. From greenhouse gases to renewable energy, discover how much you really understand about one of the world's most pressing issues.
30 of 145 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which greenhouse gas, far more abundant than carbon dioxide, has its level set by temperature rather than emissions?
Water Vapor
Water vapor does about half of all the atmosphere's heat-trapping, but because warmer air holds more of it, it amplifies warming that other gases start rather than causing it.
Q 02Which 1997 treaty committed industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol was signed by the Clinton administration in 1998 but never sent to the Senate for ratification, and the treaty did not enter into force until 2005.
Q 03At which Hawaiian observatory has CO2 been measured continuously since 1958, producing the Keeling Curve?
Mauna Loa
Mauna Loa was chosen because the high, remote volcano is far from continents and has little vegetation, so its air reflects the well-mixed atmosphere rather than local pollution.
Q 04What is the largest human activity contributing to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels?
Burning Fossil Fuels
Burning fossil fuels is the leading cause, and scientists can prove it: fossil carbon contains no radioactive carbon-14, and the air's share of that isotope has been falling as CO2 climbs.
Q 05What natural process has atmospheric gases trap heat and warm Earth's surface?
Greenhouse Effect
The greenhouse effect was measured in the laboratory by John Tyndall in 1859; Swedish meteorologist Nils Gustaf Ekholm attached the greenhouse name to it in 1901, decades after the physics had been worked out.
Q 06Which potent greenhouse gas persists in the atmosphere for only about 12 years?
Methane
Methane traps far more heat than CO2 while it lasts but breaks down in about 12 years, so cutting its emissions is one of the quickest ways to slow warming within a couple of decades.
Q 07Which scientist showed in an 1856 paper that CO2 absorbs heat and could alter climate?
Eunice Newton Foote
Eunice Newton Foote's 1856 paper found that a glass cylinder filled with carbon dioxide heated far more in sunlight than one of ordinary air, three years before John Tyndall's better-known experiments.
Q 08Which scientist first quantitatively predicted, in 1896, the warming from doubling atmospheric CO2?
Svante Arrhenius
Svante Arrhenius was really trying to explain what had caused the great glaciations; he later suggested that industrial emissions might spare the world a new one and help feed a growing population.
Q 09Besides melting land ice, what is the other main cause of global sea level rise?
Thermal expansion
Thermal expansion: water swells as it warms, and the ocean has soaked up more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, enough to cause nearly half of the rise in recent decades.
Q 10What do scientists call the ocean's chemical shift caused by absorbing excess carbon dioxide?
Ocean Acidification
Ocean acidification leaves fewer carbonate ions in seawater, so oysters, clams and tiny plankton struggle to build their shells, which in the worst cases begin to dissolve.
Q 11Which climate policy sets a fixed ceiling on emissions and lets firms exchange permits?
Cap and Trade
Cap and trade got its first national test in 1995, when American power plants began trading sulfur dioxide permits under a scheme to cut the pollution behind acid rain.
Q 12Which impact on marine ecosystems occurs when heat-stressed animals expel the colourful algae living in their tissues?
Coral Bleaching
Coral bleaching leaves the animals white and hungry, because the expelled algae were feeding them; they can recover if the water cools, but a long heatwave kills the reef.
Q 13What term do climate scientists use for action to cut greenhouse gas emissions or boost the sinks that absorb them?
Climate Mitigation
Q 21Which two United Nations bodies set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988?
WMO and UNEP
WMO and UNEP, the UN's weather and environment agencies, founded the panel, which does no research of its own: thousands of scientists volunteer to assess the published studies instead.
Q 22Which planet's thick carbon dioxide atmosphere traps so much heat that its surface is hot enough to melt lead?
Venus
Venus is the hottest planet, around 465 °C at the surface, even though Mercury orbits much closer to the Sun; scientists study it as a warning of runaway warming.
Q 23Which nation has released the most cumulative carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution?
United States
Climate Mitigation keeps getting cheaper: once hopelessly expensive, onshore wind and solar panels had by 2020 become the cheapest ways to generate new electricity in many regions.
Q 14What term describes ground frozen for at least two consecutive years, which releases carbon as it thaws?
Permafrost
Permafrost holds about twice as much carbon as the atmosphere; when it thaws, microbes digest plant remains frozen for thousands of years and release that carbon as heat-trapping gases.
Q 15Which feedback loop amplifies warming as bright surfaces give way to darker land and water?
Ice-Albedo Feedback
Ice-albedo feedback: snow-covered sea ice reflects up to 90% of sunlight while open ocean absorbs about 94%, a big reason the Arctic has warmed nearly four times faster than the globe since 1979.
Q 16Parts of which rainforest now release more carbon than they absorb, a 2021 study in the journal Nature found?
The Amazon
The Amazon's south-east, the section hit hardest by deforestation and fire, has flipped from soaking up carbon to giving it off, a reversal for a forest long counted on as a brake on warming.
Q 17Which kind of extreme weather has grown more frequent and intense over most land since the 1950s?
Heavy downpours
Heavy downpours are getting heavier because air holds about 7% more moisture for every degree Celsius it warms, so each storm has more water to shed.
Q 18What is the term for capturing atmospheric carbon dioxide and storing it long-term in forests, soils or rock?
Carbon Sequestration
Carbon sequestration happens naturally on a vast scale: plant growth and the oceans together remove about half of the CO2 that humans emit, and only the rest stays in the air.
Q 19Which 2015 treaty, adopted at COP21, aims to keep global warming well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels?
Paris Agreement
The Paris Agreement lets each country set its own emissions pledge instead of imposing targets, but requires a new, more ambitious pledge every five years.
Q 20Which synthetic gas, used to insulate high-voltage switchgear, is the most potent greenhouse gas the IPCC has assessed?
Sulfur Hexafluoride
Sulfur hexafluoride traps more than 20,000 times as much heat as CO2 and lingers for many centuries, so every leak from the power grid is effectively permanent.
The United States has emitted roughly a quarter of all fossil-fuel CO2 since 1850, more than any other nation; China overtook the US in annual emissions only around 2006.
Q 24What term describes the total greenhouse gas emissions caused by a person, product, organisation or country?
Carbon Footprint
Carbon footprint went mainstream thanks to an oil company: BP's advertising in the mid-2000s promoted a personal calculator, which critics say shifted the blame onto individuals.
Q 25What name is given to a home or office that generates as much renewable power over a year as it uses?
Zero-energy building
A zero-energy building is no longer a niche idea: since the end of 2020, European Union rules have required every new building to be 'nearly zero-energy'.
Q 26Which process, in effect the reverse of photosynthesis, do plants, animals and microbes use to turn sugars back into carbon dioxide?
Cellular Respiration
Cellular respiration never stops, so each northern winter, when plant growth stalls, the CO2 in the air climbs for months until summer leaves pull it back down.
Q 27Which scientist's June 1988 Senate testimony raised broad public awareness of global warming?
James Hansen
James Hansen, then director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a Senate committee on 23 June 1988 that he was 99 percent confident the warming trend was real and not a chance fluctuation.
Q 28What are the numerical simulations coupling atmosphere, ocean, land and ice to project Earth's future called?
Climate Models
Climate Models have a solid track record: a 2020 review of 17 projections published between 1970 and 2007 found that most had accurately predicted the warming that followed.
Q 29What technology captures CO2 from a point source and injects it into deep geological formations?
Carbon Capture and Storage
Carbon capture and storage began at scale in 1996 at the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, where burying the CO2 under the seabed proved cheaper than paying a carbon tax brought in five years earlier.
Q 30Half of all species with long-term records have shifted their ranges in which direction, the IPCC reported in 2022?
Poleward
Poleward, or uphill on mountains, as species follow the temperatures they are adapted to; where they could not keep up, heat extremes have already wiped out hundreds of local populations.