Environmentalists, scientists, and NGOs were enthusiastic over the lighting of the world’s first real-time carbon counter on June 18, 2009. Located at the junction of Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street in New York City, the counter shoots 70 feet into the air outside Madison Square Garden.

Besting the city’s placard-toting doomsayers, the giant carbon-counting billboard currently pegs the number of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 3.64 trillion metric tons. The number, reportedly the highest in 800 millennia, is designed to impart a sense of urgency among its 500,000 daily onlookers.

Think-tanks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed the technology for the carbon counter, which towers seven storeys high. Even as it calculates greenhouse gases trapped in the atmosphere, the counter offsets its energy consumption. Almost 41,000 low-energy light emitting diodes (LEDs) power the digits splayed on the counter.

DeAM (Deutsche Bank Asset Management) financed this billboard, as well as its attendant “Know the Number” campaign. Both are part of the bank’s long-range effort to stave off climate doom.

Fittingly enough, a torrential downpour accompanied the lighting of the titanic display. Scientists predict unpredictable weather as among other upshots of such emissions, a fact Deutsche executives pointed out in the lighting ceremony.

MIT, for their part, estimates humankind releases 800 metric tons of greenhouse gases every second, accumulating to 2 billion metric tons a month. By the time the counter was switched on, there were 385 ppm of greenhouse gases already trapped in the atmosphere.

DeAM aims to decrease its carbon emissions by as much as 20% a year until 2013, when it hopes to become carbon-neutral. Already it ranks among the largest climate change investors in the world, managing $4 billion in assets. DeAM, for one, operates DB Climate Change Advisors group (DBCCA).

Greenhouse gases, of which carbon is only one, includes methane, nitrous oxide, and halocarbons. The belief that 450 ppm of greenhouse gases have grave consequences on global temperature is unequivocal.