Readers may recall that we caught NOAA NCDC red handed putting in a photoshopped flooded house a couple of years back for an official government report.
Image above taken directly from the CCSP report. Read more here
Then there’s the famous polar bear on the ice floe image ursus bogus.
And let’s not forget Al Gore’s hurricanes for his book cover:
So when Tom Nelson asked today “Who’s got time to investigate BlackSmokeGate?” I decided to take on the task. Here’s the photo in question:
Tom was rightfully concerned that white steam rather than smoke comes out of these plants, as shown in this photo.
This station has been identified in the comment section of the article using it as Eggborough power station. Check out the white cloud coming from the power station in this Wikipedia photo.
I decided to run a simple but well known tool to detect if Photoshop had been used. Bingo!
Output from http://www.pskiller.com/
Basically all that was done was to highlight a part of the steam with the point to point select tool, feather it and adjust the contrast to make it look darker.
[UPDATE: I found a different version of the image on the web at Sky News here and ran it through PSKiller’s detector. It’s even more damning:
PS Quantization tables are a dead giveaway. ]
I’ll bet somebody could find this image original in some stock photo library. It is from John Giles PA Wire. It gets a lot of play according to Nelson. For example here it is used in conjunction with Climategate2:
Nelson asks:
If you have time to compile a list of the mainstream media uses of this photo, please let me know. If you’ve taken some action to protest this propaganda (maybe a letter to an editor?) please also let me know.
By the way, has this photo been altered in any way? [YES – Anthony]
Update: A TinEye search for the top image yields 92 results.
A TinEye search for the bottom image yields 94 results.
To illustrate how easy this is to make black smoke from steam, I located an image of a smoke stack online of the Zimmer Power Plant Smoke Stack in Moscow, Ohio, here
Then I applied the simple technique I described.
- highlight a part of the steam with the point to point select tool
- feather it
- adjust the brightness and contrast to make it look darker.
Granted it was a rush job and I didn’t go all the way to the right in the plume, but this took all of 45 seconds:
See how easy that is to make black smoke where there was only steam before?
UPDATE2: Here’s another example of Photoshop at work. The greens must really hate this power station in Britain. “Black” smoke from cooling towers? Really? Everyone knows they produce water vapor, and even the sun angle doesn’t look right in this one from the Guardian.
It doesn’t survive the test either:
And yet if you do an image search for this power station, you’ll find nothing like this image anywhere else except on the Guardian Website.
UPDATE: Autonomous Mind looks into the photo above, conversing with the photographer is interesting more for what he doesn’t say. Well worth a read here:
Has the Guardian published fauxtography?
– Anthony
Sometimes there is a puff of black smoke from a coal plant’s stack if there is a startup in progress or some kind of upset occurs. The regulator has opacity meters installed on the stacks to measure this and strictly limits the amount of black smoke that can be emitted. As has been mentioned the effluent from the stack is not steam. It is flue gases, CO2, NO2, etc, and what particulates have not been precipitated out of the flue gases. It is “steam” you see rising from the hyperbolic cooling towers. There was a comment about what a waste that was and that it should be possible to use it for district heat. Not so. District heat provided from a coal burning power plant would use some of the main or extraction steam, which would sacrifice some of the plant’s efficiency to provide a saleable product (steam for district heat). What comes from the cooling towers is merely water vapor and, mostly, water droplets from the exchange of the heat in the circulating water with the atmosphere. This water is perhaps 105ºF when it enters the cooling tower and something close to ambient air temperature, or a little below, when it leaves the cooling tower and is returned to the turbine’s condenser. Upwards of 50% of the unit’s heat is lost through the cooling towers. But, it isn’t useful for much since its temperature is so low.
So the BBC was using this (probably stock) photo nearly 5 years ago:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6265485.stm
Move along guys, nothing to see here….
BTW,
The energy provided by such power stations is what allows each of us to enjoy our standard of living. It will not be replaced by wind or any other renewable resource without considerable negative effect on those living standards. The aggregate effect of the effluent on ones health is trivial compared to the effect on ones health of freezing in the dark.
I’m always bemused when images of this nature are trotted out as ‘proof’. Especially when they talk about Carbon Dioxide, which is a ‘colourless, odourless gas’ above 216.6 degrees Kelvin. Surely ‘massive plumes of CO2’ would be invisible?
I think the most disturbing thing is that. although they claim to be scientists, they haven’t the foggiest idea of how a power station generates electricity.
Ron says:
November 25, 2011 at 2:42 pm
…..I do absolutely believe the profession has an overwhelming bias through peer enforcement and employer mandate towards integrity in that regard, unlike the climate science profession. Again, I think the photographer himself should weigh in, and perhaps he will eventually. Anthony’s site is widely read.
___________________________________
I hope you are correct, but I have seen the news media used as a “weapon” too many times to think there is much ” integrity” left at least at the higher levels.
Yes there is integrity at the lower levels thank goodness but if the story steps on the wrong toes it is OUT. I know of four journalists fired over issues during the “Farm Wars” here in the USA and at least two other self serving lies. Lies where I was in a position to KNOW the TV news coverage AND FILM FOOTAGE was not just “Doctored” but entirely fictional because I was at ground zero and I know what happened.
As my Father-in-law, owner of a newspaper, used to say, the only thing you can trust is true in a newspaper is the sports scores.
There is a lot of grey and dark grey in the photo of the Earth’s atmosphere in the header of this blog… I see some ominous plumes too… hmmm… is it all water vapour?…
Ahhh… it IS photoshopped!
Still a very beautiful view tough… 😉
“Rosco says:
November 25, 2011 at 2:20 pm”
He was once a full-blown supporter of the coming ice age scare in the 70’s as I recall.
As a measure towards accuracy, accountability, traceability and authenticity, *I* have made it policy to retain the untouched originals for any pictures/images I have taken, should the need arise in a public forum or a courtroom to defend my photographic ‘works’ or what my works depict … can this be said by everyone?
.
Is it any wonder that when the communist terrorist in the western world disappeared in the late 80’s that the militant lying cheatards greens was belched out to take its place in, oh wait for it, the late 80’s?
It’s so sad really, because the true green, grass roots, never really lied and cheated about anything until they got infiltrated by the socialists. :p
From the comments it looks like a lot of Journalists are here – to keep an eye on the unfolding revelations from the climategate material no doubt. Journalists are supposedly interested in the news. However I’ve observed that they are typically more interested in discussing Journalism. No doubt that is why so many have ended up congregating here.
Hey Ian. Everyone reading here could only hope ‘a lot of Journalists are here’. So far in this thread, I think I am the only confessed journalist that I’ve seen, and a photo journalist at that. The *reason* I am here, posting on this thread, is that it concerns my area of long expertise, thirty years worth, both in the field and management. We all could use more journalists here, and should seek ways of making that so. Because… most journalists I work with, and likely most journalists period, would not have the time of day for a sceptical non-AGW point of view such as that expressed ever so cleverly and correctly here. Let us work together huh?
Hint to Journalists, everything about Climate Science’s alleged “science” is fake: “perception is reality.”
Scrubbing CO2 from air could be a long-term commitment
Submitted by Jamie Williamson on Fri, 07/02/2010 – 15:06 Washington
http://www.topnews.in/usa/scrubbing-co2-air-could-be-long-term-commitment-24770
http://topnews.in/usa/files/carbon-dioxide.jpg
The photo is in today’s Daily Telegraph, someone named Lean.
I joined the legions of commenters protesting about it.
He might be having a lean time this morning.
In Tips n Notes
View from the Solent http://wattsupwiththat.com/tips-notes-3/#comment-808278
posted two links of interest. A letter from Lord Turnbull & Lord Lawson to Chris Huhne (UK Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change) and the other link on scams and how they develop in for eg health.
Climate Gate: A symptom of driving science off the cliff
Being driven off a cliff reminded me, besides lemmings, photo-shopping and such, of the first colour feature film produced in Australia. The dramatic Jedda (1955) and all the photo-shopping in shades of colour, geography and rock art that went on with this film. And the subsequent digital remix for DVD release. All the colours changed! The main actors were all dubbed, with the narrator (and a main actor) of the plot (Joe) attributed with a false name in the credits.
Link below 1/3 provides a clip of Jedda who Marbuck stole and which the elders sung him to death for this behaviour.
http://aso.gov.au/titles/features/jedda/clip3/
‘Joe’s’ real identity was apparently not realised until 1994, when ‘accidentally’ he was interviewed at a BBQ. (BBQ – where Ozzies stand around outside cooking steak on a gas or wood fired appliance).
…a shocking account of the institutional privileges of whiteness is a post-modern account of [black] theatre and its influence on race relations projected to the Australian landscape and peoples.
http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/320/465
Sadly, Robert Tudawali (Marbuck) of northern Australia (Tiwi Islands) of Jedda fame died in 1967 http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/tudawali-robert-11889 as a result of continuing ill-health & compounded by burns possibly caused when he was set alight when he refused to allow his young daughter to be taken for marriage.
Rosalie Kunoth (played Jedda) of central Australia continued her career away from formal acting and is now Chancellor of a university & Shire President, representing also her homelands of Utopia in Central Australia.
I hate to say it, but one of your examples is clearly not a “shop”. It might be processed in Photoshop, but it is not altered in terms of cloud appearance.
[img]http://www.schloerb.com/WUWT/Cloud_Shadow.jpg[/img]
I’m working in the visual effects industry. Even for someone with a professional background it would be a massive pain in the behind to tone down those faint clouds without also receiving heavy edge artifacts against the light sky background. And even if you made it, why would you then omit parts of the white clouds from that adjustment? It doesn’t make sense at all…
For me that is clearly a cloud shadow hitting the plumes. You can even recognize the straight outlines of that shadow volume precisely following the lighting direction and perspective.
Some dislike the term “photoshopped” because there are other image processing programs with different names that produce similar to better effects. (For example, I have been using CorelDraw since 1993). So, running a specific Adobe Photoshop detector over an image might not give the right answer. There are many techniques to fiddle the steam in the examples shown. Some detection techniques that work on digital camera images do not work on film images scanned separately.
As a phlatelist, I have developed forensic methods to find minute variations in postage stamps and I would almost guarantee that I could produce a false defect that one would not be able to prove as being false. The reverse equation, whether I can find all examples of adjustments in a set of trial stamps or photos, is harder to answer, since much depends on file size. I usually work with image files of 30MB or so, so these tiny creatures for Internet transmission after heaps of compression can be quite difficult.
BTW, a reputable stock agency would perhaps be interested in the laws broken by users who modify their stock images without express permission. It’s like a copyright infringement (and it’s an insult to the photographer as well.)
Yep, Photoshopped.
Most images these days are jpeg format, whose lossy DCT compression algorithm divides the image into 8×8 pixel squares. Enlarged enough to see the pixels, you find horizontal, vertical, and checkerboard patterns, aliases that result from the math formula applied to the square. After you Photoshop a jpeg, you then have to recompress the image to save it, so you are compressing the false alias data, resulting in more alias data at the pixel level.
Unless you crop exactly on the 8 pixel boundaries, you get additional distortion. This happened In the smokestack image, where you can see the recompressed squares offset and overlying the original squares, rather than having the clean square boundaries of an original image.
About the only practical way to trick up an image is to start with a RAW image, uncompressed but ridiculously large. Better cameras can save in the RAW format, and Photoshop can handle RAW images. After you retouch it, you can then save it as a jpeg, and it will look original, at least at the pixel level.
But why bother? It’s not like cuddly drowning polar bears emitting CO2 images are going to be peer reviewed or anything.
Having considered this picture and the others like it by the same photographer at the PA image library I linked to above, I’m quite settled on it not being photoshopped. For a start, if it was me altering it digitally I would have removed the incidences of dust that have appeared on some of the other images due to using a small aperture on the camera.
Setting the camera to correctly capture the bright blue cloudless sky in the background and standing in the right place would be enough to achieve those images imo.
Made from 100% real images!
https://twitter.com/#!/LesClay/media/slideshow?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitpic.com%2F7jx4qa
Any Idiot with a smoke readers license can tell that’s steam. It’s too fluffy to be smoke.
Seriously. That’s how you tell white (sulfur) smoke from steam, by the fluffiness (it’s hard to describe). Steam behaves completely differently than smoke, and you never have smoke in the middle of a steam plume. If it’s hot enough to smoke then it’s evaporated all the water off. If it’s not, then if it’s a flare, the steam will be focusing the flame. If it’s a boiler, the steam will knock out the smoke.
It seems odd to me that from the same stack a plume with both white billows and dark would emerge. See the upper part of the plume? Billows white as snow. How would that happen?
Outstanding post. Lies are endemic in the establishment, and not just with regard to AGM.
Ah, photographers…
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2007/05/13/the-miraculous-photoshop-diet/
http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/Fake_photos.php
http://www.psdisasters.com/