Check out this new widget from the DB Climate Change Advisors website. You can download it for your desktop, or embed it on your website, and it is described by its creators as:

"An accurate, real-time display of the estimated amount of green house gases in our atmosphere. The number is the same figure which is displayed on the real Carbon Counter in New York City."

We've been coming across a lot of carefully soundbited countdowns recently in the race to cut global emssions, so it's a slightly startling change of perspective to be confronted with a count-up pushing so forcefully in the opposite direction. To help put things in perspective, those whizzing numbers are going to keep getting faster and faster until we hit peak emissions... which, according to the most ambitious time-span put forward by the UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband, is going to be in ten years time, 2020. The IPCC has urged that we need to cut emissions by at least 40% by 2020 in order to "provide a better chance of avoiding devastation" in low-lying islands and costal areas.