. . . is the starting-point value for the Carbon Counter, switched on in midtown Manhattan on 18 June. The six-story display was developed by DB Climate Change Advisors, an arm of Deutsche Bank, to help raise public awareness of the global atmosphere’s ever-increasing stock of greenhouse gases. DB worked with the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop the algorithm behind the counter. It draws on regular measurements of greenhouse gases worldwide, omitting hard-to-measure aerosols and factoring out the effects of the El Niño/ Southern Oscillation and other cyclic phenomena. The atmosphere’s carbon load is increasing at about two billion metric tons per month, according to the counter, which uses about 40,000 low-power LEDs and can be downloaded as a desktop widget.

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