19 Jun 2009
New Yorkers are to receive real-time information on the rising level of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, via a giant 70-feet-tall digital billboard outside Madison Square Garden and Penn Station.
The billboard, which is being touted as the world's first scientifically valid, real-time indicator of carbon emissions, was officially unveiled yesterday by Deutsche Bank's Asset Management division and a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
At the unveiling, the billboard showed there are currently 3.64 trillion tonnes of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and that the figure is rising by 800 metric tonnes a second.
The data will also be made available online and people are being invited to download a widget that allows them to install the counter on their desktop or company web site.
Speaking following the launch of the counter, Kevin Parker, global head of Deutsche Bank's Asset Management division, said the aim of the new counter was to provide a tangible reminder of the impact of climate change.
"We cannot see greenhouse gases, so it is easy to forget that they are accumulating rapidly," he said. "It will be a huge task to bring global emissions under control and my hope is that putting this data in public view will spur both governments and markets to move us more quickly to a low-carbon economy."
MIT's John Reilly said the counter would lag slightly behind real time as the rate of increase in emissions would be based on data collected on a monthly basis. He also confirmed that the effect of seasonal variations had been stripped out from the data to give a better picture of the underlying rate of interest.
But he insisted that with the counter drawing on measurements from dozens of atmospheric stations around the world, it presented the most up-to-date information on greenhouse gas emissions.
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Keeping our eyes on CO2
Climate change and the rapid rise of carbon emissions are important issues. The attention and awareness that Deutsche Bank is bringing to them is a helpful development. Always keep in mind the ultimate objective behind the growing efforts to reduce emissions: to stabilize the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases at a safe level in the atmosphere. World-leading climate scientists tell us that means getting atmospheric CO2 down to 350 parts per million. To see the worlds most recent data for atmospheric CO2, visit Earths CO2 Home Page at http://co2now.org (hosted from servers powered directly by solar panels). Or add one of the free CO2Now widgets to your site ? the worlds first and only source for widgets that keeps current CO2 on display far and wide. Atmospheric CO2 was 390.18 ppm in May 2009, the latest data available when the Deutsche Bank ?carbon counter? widget was launched. Based on this almost-real time data, measured by NOAA scientists directly from the atmosphere, we can see that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 continues to accelerate upward from decade to decade. Consider placing an emissions widget and an atmospheric CO2 widget side-by-side. The emissions level needs to be seen together with the atmospheric concentration, not in isolation.
Posted by Michael McGee, 19 Jun 2009