The bogosity of Winter Storm Bodil

There’s so much desperation to tie extreme weather to climate change these days, that some people have taken to photoshopping faked images to make the point. In case you didn’t catch that, it’s a double entendre. Observe.

Sadly, even the Danes have picked up the Weather Channel’s silly naming of non tropical and winter storms. It even has a Wikipedia page. This photo of winter storm “Bodil” is circulating today on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media as it approaches Denmark:

One look at the mesocyclone in that locale told me it was bogus, not only is it meteorologically unlikely, the light is all wrong. It’s comically bad. But the hilarity has to do with the fact that the image is doubly bogus. It has been photoshopped twice. Once to put the storm over the city, and a second time to take out the logo identifying it as a gag image produced by a satire website.

Here’s the “gag” image:

Source: http://9gag.com/gag/a5dXzNG

Note the 9GAG logo (above my drawn red arrow) has been removed and is now in the wild as shown above in Twitter. Yes, that’s right, they faked the fake.

Here is the original mesocyclone, from Montana, USA

Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/570972058977542637/

The picture from Denmark that mesocyclone was added to is of Nyhavn canal, in Copenhagen, a touristy spot. It also has its own Wikipedia page.

While I couldn’t find the exact night photo used to make the fake, this one its very close, taken just a few steps up from the original vantage point:

Update: The original Copenhagen scene has been located, h/t to ArtRubicon and Helge K

This fake of “Bodil” now join the ranks of other faked weather events, such as this laughable faked photo supposedly from Hurricane Sandy:

About.com Urban Legends has this explanation:

It was created by combining a fairly standard image of New York Harbor with a 2004 photo of a supercell thunderstorm taken by professional storm chaser Mike Hollingshead.

And this faked one from Hurricane Katrina:

So, if you see somebody pushing any of these faked photos as proof of (take your pick: global warming, climate disruption, Al Gore is near, Bigfoot, Chemtrails, weather control, or increasing extreme weather) set them straight.

UPDATE2:  I forgot to add a link to this example of photoshopping from a couple years back, where Al Gore had to add hurricanes to his book cover. He couldn’t even get the hemispheric rotation right, likely because he’s never heard of the Coriolis Force.

Not finding any, Gore airbrushes in hurricanes for his new book