New Yorkers leaving Penn station and the tenor Andrea Bocelli’s concert at Madison Square Garden stadium were confronted with an unusual advert yesterday – a huge sign showing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

[efoods]Updated in real time, using projections from monthly measurements of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Carbon Counter is designed to get everyone to reduce their emissions.

Kevin Parker, the global head of Deutsche Bank’s asset management division, which put up the 21-metre sign, said: “Carbon in the atmosphere has reached an 800,000-year high. We can’t see greenhouse gases, so it is easy to forget that they are accumulating rapidly.”

Yesterday the counter, which uses 40,960 low-energy LEDs and carbon-offsets its electricity usage, gave a figure of 3.64tn tonnes.

At current rates, the counter’s figures are expected to rise by 2bn tonnes a month. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stands at about 387 parts per million (ppm), up by more than a third on pre-industrial revolution levels of about 280ppm.

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