NYC Billboard Monitors Rising Greenhouse Gases

NEW YORK — New Yorkers have long been able to keep tabs on the national debt, but they now have a highly visible counter to track greenhouse gas emissions.

A 70-foot-high billboard outside Madison Square Garden and Pennsylvania Station, not far from the Empire State Building, features a carbon counter. Digital numbers help viewers track the amount of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere. As of Thursday morning, it stood at more than 3.6 trillion metric tons.

The sign uses low-energy lights, offset by carbon credits.

The carbon counter is sponsored by Deutsche Bank. It is a few blocks from the National Debt Clock, which keeps track of the U.S. government's debt.

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On the Net:

http://www.know-the-number.com

Comments

[blimie]

There are ways that pollution could be reduced right now. Why did Obama offer such a feeble plan for gas mileage? The government isn't working on fixing the problem, they are working on generating billions and billions of dollars in carbon taxes.

[Richard2]

On June 18, Senator Schumer of New York demanded assistance for farmers due to low seasonal temperatures that have destroyed grape crops in New York state this year. Yet At the same time Senator Schumer claims to believe in human caused global warming, and that CO2 is a harmful gas.

If man-made CO2 really was forcing global warming, we wouldn't be seeing so many signs of global cooling, such as New York vineyards being ruined by cold spring temperatures, or the "big chill in churchill."

[realpolitic]

Does one spring indicate global cooling to you, especially when Australia recently saw rampant fires that destroyed whole towns?

[Richard2]

If the climate experts could predict weather even one year in advance, then they might have some credibility for predicting the weather 50 or 100 years from now. However, they obviously can not reliably predict the weather even one year in advance.

Did any of the climate experts predict that cold weather would be destroying grape crops in New York this year? Did any of them predict that the western Canadian wheat crop would be significantly smaller this year, compared to last year, due to cold weather?

Of what usefulness are climate experts, who don't focus on helping people to cope with natural variations in the weather this year and next year, rather than focusing on fanciful forecasts of weather 100 years from now?

[Greenguy25]

You have to love the those who continue to deny climate change concerns even when their heros from false news, (meant Fox news) have been changing thier own course in the face of so much proof.

I feel we owe them a shout out, because being different is good that is of course if they do not confuse being stupid with being different.

http://www.mygreenscene.com

[SteveMI]

I think you're confusing proof with pop-culture/politics-
We'd all love to hear your 'scientific understanding' of Co2 and global warming though- usually a good laugh.

[elmerfude]

Liar pants on fire. You wouldn't love to hear any such scientific understanding. It is readily available out there from a number of scientific sources but you would rather just take a road trip down the ignorant highway.

[SteveMI]

It would be nice if they showed the main greenhouse gas- water vapor, but I don't suppose there's enough space-

It would be funny for someone to put a 'dollars made by Al Gore from suckers' ticker underneath

[melmoid]

What! Are you a commie? Al Gore is entitled to make a buck.

[SteveMI]

Sure- from anyone scientifically illiterate enough to go along with him. :)

[melmoid]

Water vapor is a greenhouse gas! OMG I am going up the street right now to the national lab to tell my atmospheric science friends about this. I am sure they will be shocked! Thanks for letting us all know.

[SteveMI]

I doubt it, they probably already know that, as well as knowing that Co2 is a colorless odorless harmless nutrient to all life, not a pollutant, and our annual contribution is a tiny fraction of that released naturally through respiration.

scientists are usually pretty up on that stuff, but not everybody is.

[mioffe]

We must send back to school all scientists, world leaders, editors of newspapers and magazines, who provide and support wrong ideas of Al Gore.
GHG are not main players in nature. Every dedicated person, who has at least 9 grade of education could understand that properties of water, water VAPOR, water DROPLETS, winds and their direction are more important than GHG. Special properties of water actualy cool the air, despite that water Vapor is also GHG.
President Obama must fire all scientists who adviced to Government reduce GHG by cap and trade agreement, who choose very expensive directions of wind, solar, nuclear power.
They are not scientists, they create cult from GHG and ignore or misunderstand role of soot, tilling of land, building roads and parking lots, cities, which reduce reflection of direct sun radiation back to space.
These mankind activities increase huge convection forces, which responsible for moving hot air from equator to poles.
DEBATES ARE OVER, THEY MUST BE PUNISHED AND SEND BACK TO SCHOOL!

[fumes]

correct me if i'm wrong (lol)..

but does this war on CO2 feel like the run-up to the iraq war to anyone else?

[melmoid]

Of course you are wrong. You are corrected. I do sometimes feel some pressure that is a buildup to some fumes.

[fumes]

of course.. thanks melmoid.

[realpolitic]

Wow, what a conspiracy theory! You mean that a few government bureaucrats finding lies to invade Iraq behind closed doors and then selling them to the public is comparable to an entirely open process where scientists publish all their knowledge in journals, which are debated endlessly, and are supported with readily verified field observations. Fumes is really reaching!

[sc300nc]

I hear the billboard is so prominent, Al Gore can see it from his private jet when he flies by.

[Overtone]

CLOSED SYSTEMS: If you run a car in a garage with a person inside death is certain in a few hours.

If this person were in a larger enclosed space with several buses running, it might take a few months, but eventually death is equally certain.

Now take 6 billion people on Earth with 200 million cars, 5,000 aircraft and 2,000 coal-fired power plants running 24/7 in a 30 mile deep atmosphere and of course it will take years, but as surely as in the garage, at some point large numbers of people will die.

We have no garage door to open.

We are putting at least 60 + billion pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere daily!

The oceans have long buffered the effects of climate change by absorbing a substantial portion of the carbon dioxide. But this has a catch - marine scientists say acidity is accelerating so fast it threatens the survival of coral reefs, shellfish and the marine food web generally.

If we don't dramatically reduce our CO2 emissions, somewhere in the near future catastrophic failure of our eco system is inevitable.

The vast majority of world scientists agree the window is short to prevent disaster. We may have only 6 to 10 years. "We're toast if we don't get on a very different path," James Hansen

"This is the last chance. Human life, the planet itself, is at a critical juncture. How we respond, and how quickly, matters.”

[elmerfude]

Good post. It is a matter of a mass balance equation considering the earth as a closed living system (Gaia). It is like taking too much alcohol into your system too fast--the metabolism doesn't work instantly. (The number of 5,000 aircraft seems low to me and of course there all the ships.) It took nature millions of years to accumulate all the organic material to make coal and oil. You just can't release a good portion of it back into the atmosphere in 100 years or so without some consequences. Even adaptable plants and animals require time to evolve.

[lbrty 2112]

Current co2 = 380 ppm. co2 during the ice age of the late odovician period = 4000+ ppm.

spin that.

[elmerfude]

Like all scientists, you should give a technical reference for these numbers so we can independently check them and examine the methodology by which they were derived.

[mioffe]

Al Gore: “The chemical and thermal dynamics of global are extremely complex, but scientists are looking especially carefully at the role played by one molecule: carbon dioxide (CO2). Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we have been producing increasing quantities of CO2’ and we are now dumping vast amount of it into the global atmosphere… But as a percentage of the total atmosphere, CO2 represents only about .03 percent of the molecules that make up the air, or 355 per million. Even so, it has always played a critical role in the greenhouse gas that triggers enough warming to increase amount of water vapor that evaporates from the oceans into the atmosphere. This extra water vapor, in turn, traps nearly 90 percent of the infrared rays radiated from the surface of the earth back toward space, retaining them long enough to maintain the earth’s temperature in rough equilibrium.
The correlation between CO2 levels and temperature levels overtime is well established…
The amount of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere has fluctuated significantly over time in cycles lasting tens of thousands of years. The ice ages, for example, correspond to period when CO2 concentrations were relatively lower than they have been for the last 15,000 years. A few years ago, scientists from the Soviet Union and France conducted an extensive analysis of the tiny bubbles of atmosphere trapped in the ice in the deep hole they drilled in Antarctica two miles down through 160,000 year’s worth of ice.

[mioffe]

After learning to read the ice the way foresters read tree rings, they found a striking correlation between the ups and downs of CO2 and of temperature during all that time. As can been seen…CO 2 level fluctuated between 200 parts per million (ppm) during the last two ice ages and 300 (ppm) during the period of great warming between the two ice ages. The global average temperature rose and fell along a line that seems to match the line measuring CO2.
Surprisingly, however, the range of this natural illustration is quite small compared to the changes caused by humankind. We are driving CO2 from its warm level of 300 to over 600 ppm-with most of that change occurring since World War II. In fewer than fifty years, we have doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere when this century began. For not only are we putting huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, we are also interfering with the normal way CO2 is usually removed from the atmosphere.”

If Al Gore will ask himself: “Why during 160,000 years change of carbon dioxide from 200 ppm to 300 ppm created changes in temperature almost 10º C? Why right now we change CO2 level from 285 ppm to 355 ppm during 50 years and have temperature changes only around 1º C?”
I hope he will be not so sure about role of carbon dioxide in nature.

[mioffe]

Dear Overtone, I am sure you read about closed systems for space programs.

[Richard2]

CO2 is a plant fertilizer. It helps plants grow faster and larger. If the climate cools, farmers are going to need all that extra CO2 to help produce the food we eat.

The sign is a great idea. It shows how city people are helping the farmers of the world.

[melmoid]

It is a raw material for photosynthesis. However plant growth depends on a number of factors any one of which can be limiting; soil and water pH, access to space and sunlight, soil fertility, trace element availability, water and impact of diseases. The major limiting factor will be and in many places already is water. Carbon dioxide is clearly not a limiting factor now because the carbon dioxide levels have been increasing for years now. The plants are not keeping up with the available carbon dioxide. Therefore your statement is a little misleading.

[Richard2]

CO2 = green plants.

No CO2 = brown plants.

The sign in New York should be in Green for CO2.

[mioffe]

Dear melmoid, if "soil and water pH, access to space and sunlight, soil fertility, trace element availability, water and impact of diseases" are in perfect condition extra CO2 will help trees to grow.

[lbrty 2112]

Of course it's supported by Deutsche Bank. They are the major player in the euro carbon trading scam