Guest post by Jim Steele
Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
MSN appears to be a source of climate fear mongering and “fake climate news” based on their story under the headlines Antarctica hits record high temperature at balmy 63.5°F .
The story was accompanied by what can only be a horribly photo-shopped photograph for the unassuming warmunista of a mushroom-shaped ice form teetering on a rocky outcrop.
Supposedly it was photographed on the opposite side of the continent from which the record temperature occurred. Climbing such a structure would be a difficult technical climb for an experienced mountaineer. Furthermore when Adele penguins come ashore to breed they avoid the ice if possible, only crossing snowfields as the seek ice-free breeding territories. Lastly if you magnify the picture 500%, the penguins become extremely pixilated, the ice chunk less so, and the background rocks even less so, a fingerprint of 3 different photographs with different resolution that have been overlain.
MSN reported, “An Argentine research base near the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula has set a heat record at a balmy 63.5° Fahrenheit (17.5 degrees Celsius), the U.N. weather agency said on Wednesday.” The record was set in 2015 and the WMO report simply confirmed the temperature. The Wunderblog had reported in March 2015, “On March 24th Base Esperanza (under Argentinean administration) located near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula reported a temperature of 17.5°C (63.5°F). Although this is the warmest temperature ever measured since weather stations became established [in 1953] on the southern continent, it is complicated by what the very definition of ‘Antarctica’ is.
To induce fear over Esperanza’s temperature record MSN writes, “Antarctica locks up 90 percent of the world’s fresh water as ice and would raise sea levels by about 60 meters (200 ft) if it were all to melt, meaning scientists are concerned to know even about extremes around the fringes.”
However high temperatures at Esperanza tell us nothing about climate change, or if there is any threat of melting ice caps or rising sea level. Instead Esperanza presents a prime example of how temperatures can rise dramatically without any increased input of heat. Argentina’s Esperanza weather station is situated on the most extreme equatorward tip of the Antarctic peninsula and its mean monthly temperature for March is -3.6 C. But Esperanza’s location subjects it to episodic warm northwesterly winds which is why it is also infamous for its foehn wind storms that can dramatically increase temperatures by 10 to 40 C degrees in a matter of hours.
This record 17 C (63.5 F) temperature recently recorded, is 20 C above average, and as expected the record temperature is the result of foehn winds. Foehn winds warm temperatures via adiabatic heating (no heat input) as descending winds passing over the nearby mountains warm from adiabatic compression. It is meaningless weather regards penguins. But no mention of foehn winds by MSN.
At least the Wunderblog, was honest about the cause of record warming in 2015 stating,
“A strong high pressure ridge and a Foehn wind led to the record temperatures as Jeff Masters explains here:
This week’s record temperatures were made possible by an unusually extreme jet stream contortion that brought a strong ridge of high pressure over the Antarctic Peninsula, allowing warm air from South America to push southwards over Antarctica. At the surface, west to east blowing winds over the Antarctic Peninsula rose up over the 1,000-foot high mountains just to the west of Esperanza Base, then descended and warmed via adiabatic compression into a warm foehn wind that reached 44 mph (71 km/hr) at 09 UTC on March 24th, near when the maximum temperature was recorded. A similar event also affected Marambio on the 23rd.”
Likewise in the 2016 paper Absence of 21st century warming on Antarctic Peninsula consistent with natural variability researchers with the British Antarctic Survey reported, “The trend in the SAM led to a greater flow of mild, northwesterly air onto the AP [Antarctic Peninsula] with SAT [surface air temperature] on the northeastern side increasing most because of amplification through the foehn effect.”
This isn’t the first time such photo fakery has been used. There’s the Ursus Bogus episode, and NCDC’s fake flooded house, to name a couple. Anything for the cause – Anthony
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Never let the truth get in the way of a good story it would seem.
“…you magnify the picture 500%, the penguins become extremely pixilated, ”
————————–
HA, LOL. If you take a close look at CAGW alarmists you realize they have become extremely pixilated. ( Crazy, insane)
I remember Pixilated Penguin. It was on the flipside of Russ Conway’s UK hit Side Saddle. I think I may be showing my age here. 🙁
https://youtu.be/kePxj6QLt8A
Steely Dan’s song about a very pixilated woman:
@ur momisugly Gunga Din
Sorry for the duplication – I didn’t catch your post on first reading, and linked to the same video farther down.
Regrets.
No need for “regrets”.
I’m sure lots of readers didn’t see my clip but did see yours.
It’s all good.
My response to this article is amazement at this quote: “Antarctica locks up 90 percent of the world’s fresh water as ice and would raise sea levels by about 60 meters (200 ft) if it were all to melt, meaning scientists are concerned to know even about extremes around the fringes.”
That is possibly the WORST piece of writing I’ve seen in donkey’s years! “…meaning scientists are concerned to know even about extremes around the fringes.” –??? Y’know, I think it’s really nice that the owners of media outlets want to give morons a chance at a job, but this is a public admission that they’re willing to hire the functionally illiterate as long as those kids can holler ‘global warming’ with great enthusiasm.
If you’d like to see the textbook fraud Jim Steele exposed and splattered all over the wall by actual scientists, have a look here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/04/climate-scientist-bashing/comment-page-3/
MSN apparently cannot even bother with a good fake.
To suggest that the tip of the peninsula has anything to do with mass of the continent is a blatant lie and is as false as the childish collage photo.
The lower right of the ice is clearly reflecting blue water, not the dark rock on which is supposed to be sat.
Blatant forgery. More FAKE NEWS.
Now look at Pelosi’s bullshit and lies about Sessions testimony. She must resign.
Shhhh. Warmists don’t do math, and so don’t have any sense of proportion.
Seriously, the sheer size of the peninsula, let alone its geographical location compared to the rest of the continent would be like taking today’s temp in Florida, and saying that it means something to the average temp of the American South East.
More like taking a temperature reading in Key West and declaring that you know something about the temperature for the entire US (and part of Canada).
“MarkW March 2, 2017 at 10:52 am”
Yeah, I was trying to do the math, but that was my point. Antarctica is ‘yuge”, the Peninsula is large (and not much like the interior), and taking one temp, for one day, at the tip of the Peninsula means basically nothing.
A fake story is to good even for the bottom of a septic tank dwellers like warmist and the main stream media to pass up on!
Two many times, to times this week, too think these grammatical errors are just a typo.
“Those feet’ll steer you wrong sometimes”…
Good catch!
And isn’t it also a bit deceptive to run a two year old story as news, with a headline which makes it sound like it’s happening Right Now. Maybe they should call it “olds” instead of “news.”
Reuters ran this propaganda piece, too.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-antarctica-temperatures-idUSKBN1684I7
Base Esperanza is at the very tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, so it has the mildest temperatures on the entire continent. But, nevertheless, Weather Underground shows that it hasn’t gotten above freezing all day.
I’m sure there are some “warm” pools in the area as well, ones you can actually swim in..
Can’t recall the name of the place at the moment though
A BBC holiday programme several years ago showed wealthy (mostly) American tourists disembarking from their tour vessel, to land on the shores of Antarctica, & to wallow in the hot pools in their swimwear!
Alan, I’ve been on one of those trips. We went swimming at Deception Island and believe me it was not warm at all – the air was around 2C and the water the same. And this was in March, ie as warm as it gets.
Hot pools? Bah.
Yeah, I heard the same thing about swimming in England…
2 stinkin’ degrees . . and people wonder why we stick with Fahrenheit . .
That picture has been used many times, e.g., in 2013 with an article on Arctic warming. http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2013/12/arctic-thaw-tied-to-european-us.html
The 2013 story got about five comments all of which found the picture risible. At least they got it on the correct continent this time.
Editors and writers grab clip art. It’s not that they’re particularly evil, they’re just looking for something with some impact and they’re not going to spend a lot of time looking (or thinking).
And they wonder why they have so little credibility…
BTW, I think they are immoral, or at least amoral.
It’s difficult to distinguish between incompetence and dishonesty.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don’t rule out malice. Heinlien’s Razor
Sounds to me like you are admitting that they don’t care about accuracy, just catching the most eyeballs.
If it’s true for the picture, why should we not also assume it’s true about the story itself?
“Editors and writers grab clip art. It’s not that they’re particularly evil, they’re just looking for something with some impact and they’re not going to spend a lot of time looking (or thinking).”
NO,NO,NO,NO,NO!!!!!
These people are liberals. What they eat for breakfast is political. EVERYTHING they do is about advancing their agenda.
That photo was selected for very specific reasons with malice and forethought.
Roving Broker,
Dishonesty starts with a ‘D’ ….
Encompetence starts with an ‘E’ …
not so hard.
“That photo was selected for very specific reasons with malice and forethought.”
I agree with Matthew W. The Lefties use every trick in the book when they are trying to sell a story.
It’s more of an accusation.
In my high school newspaper/journalism class, we learned about the “inverted pyramid”. Broad strokes first, details last. Ideally, tell the overall story of the whole article in the first sentence. The assumption being that few readers will go through the whole article so give them the gist as quickly as possible.
Naturally, such a structure is easily propagandized. Spin the broad statements on the front page and bury the inconvenient details in the back. Or in this age of digital media, at the bottom where all the annoying ads usually are.
The most likely explanation is that the sea level has receded since the penguins got up there
It is a stock photo from 2010.
Stock photo(shop). FIFY
Thank you!
Wonder how a couple of flight less birds got on top of a approx 20 foot tall chuck of ice ?
Must be the vertical climbing sub-species of Adele penguins; Pygoscelis adeliae Verticalis……
Cheers, KevinK.
All we get from the MSM are lies, half-truths and distortions. They have confused tens of millions of people.
I know how those pixelated penguins got up there…
Very funny. Reminds me of the BBC’s spaghetti trees.
Pure gold . Just brilliant .
http://www.rockyhigh66.org/stuff/polar-bear_penguin.jpg
LOL, dang, that’s one pixilated bear.
CAGW makes everything and everbody pixilated.
I’ll bet that polar bear is pixilated too. It gives no sign of being hungry, so it must not have been stranded there long.
That is very funny!
LOL Great work. Fotoforensics shows the bear and penguin equally pixelated. Hmm what does that tell us?
http://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=26779c72224df1cc9e3bfd15f235a11c8514ab9e.51771&fmt=ela&size=600&i=22157723
I’m sorry Jim, you are flat out wrong here. It’s rare that on WUWT my area of expertise is relevant but it is in this case. All the fotoforensic site can do is pick up artefacts in the image. And every time an image is saved, uploaded, displayed, copied saved etc. jpeg compression artefacts are created and exacerbated along the high contrast hard lines in an image. It’s just the nature of the compression algorithm. It’s why professional photographers take images in RAW format and submit them in TIFF format. They are used in jpeg on the internet because the compression allows for a small file size. The trade off is the loss of quality and the artefact creation.
The ice chunk itself is photoshopped, and crudely. The actual base photo is of a barren rocky shore.
Craig (@Zoot_C),
But then all elements in the photograph would show the same level of compression, Craig; you know that. Neither the horizon nor the rock edges display it. The bottom left corner of the ice is straight and turns up. The terrain beneath it, however, dips, and is facing the sunlight.
@MRW, no, it does not work that way and that’s why people are paid big money to develop algorithms to combat it. It’s kind of chaotic bit it’s almost always guaranteed along the light side of hard edges of high contrast. ie. anything against a blue sky. We combat it daily as photogs.
A palm tree on the right side would really balance the whole photo niceley and “lead the eye”, don’t you think?
It needs a Unicorn….
That explains a lot about the stories I see in the BBC.
The penguins are on top of a big block of ice. Did they think that their readership would assume that the penguins just flew up there?
It used to look like this before man. get some feels.
Perhaps the two pseudo-photos above suggest why the polar bear in the first pseudo-photo gives no signs of being hungry, though it might be soon.
So the claim is that they did not fly up there? …humor
Were we to suppose the penguins FLEW up onto the ice and
couldn’t get down ? Or maybe they nested there and the ice
melted away from around them ?
It’s the kind of visual propaganda the viewer is supposed to have
a visceral reaction to without thinking about the details.
Who could DENY the penguins are in trouble ?
Be skeptical….
Even Leo Decaprio and the polar bear cub think it looks fake.
I was waiting for Leo to show up here. He’d be right at home with the whole story.
He hires trolls for that.
A Foehn Wind is a Chinook in Alberta and Montana, just different names. Leo experienced one when he was filming The Revenant during the month of January west of Calgary, and returned to the US proclaiming that he’d just experienced the worst example of global warming in his life. The entire western provinces howled in derision. Even the Canadian PM guffawed.
Esperanza Base at approximately 63S (below, or north, of the Antarctic Circle), gets a foehn wind influenced record high temperature, while Reykjavik, Iceland, at 64N gets a nation-wide paralyzing (February) record 20 inches of snow last weekend. MSM probably won’t be mentioning that story, even though the effect on Iceland was much more severe. My guess is more than few editors think it is winter down at Esperanza.
They will take any extreme conditions, warm or cold, as proof that ‘something is happening’.
A CBC announcer was talking to a climatologist about the record warm February temperature in Toronto (Canada). He wanted to know if it proved global warming. The climatologist pointed out that two years ago Toronto had a record cold February. It wasn’t the record warm temperature that should be paid attention to, it was the extremes that prove that ‘something is happening’.
You could just tell that the announcer didn’t find that very satisfying. He wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize that the record cold February disproved global warming just as much as the record hot month proved it. Nuance is an endangered species. It’s like Al Gore told him: “If you can’t say something alarming, don’t say anything.”
Yes, and one of the Toronto blogs I read (TRYING to find local events, but they keep filling it up with crappy lists and fake news) went on about the WARMEST FEBRURARY EVAH:
http://www.blogto.com/city/2017/03/toronto-just-had-warmest-february-its-history/
“The average temperature of 3.48 C beat out the previous record of 3.39 C set in 1998.”
Um, that’s an average of the HIGH temp, BTW…not mentioned in the “article”.
Toronto? Isn’t that the place where they called in the army when it snowed? They’re not even Canadian!
Well, there is Toronto and TROC (that’s The Rest of Canada), and yes, most people outside of Toronto make fun of us. And we’ll never live down calling in the Army down BUT:
1) the mayor at the time was almost as crazy as Rob Ford, (without the excuse of drug abuse)
2) we received a winter’s worth of snow in two days
3) other areas of the nation also call in the Army, as New Brunswick did this year (for snow as well)
Incredible timelapse video shows snow getting deeper and deeper as Iceland’s capital has biggest snowfall in 80 years with 20 inches in 24 hours
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4268754/Iceland-sees-20-inches-snow-24-hours.html
Worth looking at.
I think that was also on the BBC News website.
Auto
HA, if you are at Esperanza, Antarctica (bout 63° S latitude) then you are as far north as you can get from the South Pole and still be on the Antarctica continent.
So, an air temperature of 63.5° F at Esperanza, Antarctica at 63° S latitude isn’t that much more amazing than the summer air temperature of 70° F at Fairbanks Alaska at 64° N latitude.
Snow packs in the Sierras have gotten so deep that the traditional tools for measuring it, can’t.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/03/02/western-snowpack-too-deep-scientists-measuring-devices/98623436/
What’s funny is that here in New England, USA, we get snow falls like that every year or two. Here’s some good detail on one from 2015. Some years we get more than one.
http://www.weather.gov/okx/Blizzard_01262715
It will shut us down for a day or two, and some places a few more.
Nothing like pixelated penguins with a glass of whisky.
Chilly Willy is not happy about this!
http://i.giphy.com/xUPGcAzlECKEApxcME.gif
CO2 is causing a rise in pixels.
http://double-eband.com/Squanch-penguin.jpg
I need to set the record straight, here.
Penguins can, indeed, fly.
They just need an assist from a suitably sized catapult or slingshot.
Admittedly, the trajectory is a bit more “ballistic” than “controlled flight”, but they absolutely can be made to go airborne.
The same can be said of the common barnyard chicken, another “flightless” bird. As many a farm boy can attest, the chicken can also be made to fly. A topic I may have some aerodynamic engineering experience with.
Penguins do fly, and maneuver quickly while in flight, they simply do it underwater
But their wings serve negative lift in order to counter buoyant force as their plumage along with body makes for a density lower than water.
My experience tells me that most all of the common barnyard chicken breeds are capable of flying, …… iffen you don’t fatten them up too much. But they are of the same mindset as the Roadrunner who prefers “running” instead of flying.
If available, barnyard chickens will roost in trees if they don’t have a chicken coop/house to spend the nighttime in.
Chickens can fly. On the farm we had to clip their wings to keep them from flying over their pen enclosure.
There’s fly and then there’s FLY!
Lest we forget…there’s flying, and then there’s “falling with style”.
rip
The British Aviation Authority used to test the strength of windshields on planes using a device that could fire out dead chickens at extremely high speed.
The device was pointed at the aircraft’s windshield and if the chicken didn’t break it, it was assumed that the windshield would survive the impacts of actual collisions with birds when in flight.
British Rail had recently designed a new locomotive and was testing various designs of windshields, so they borrowed the device from the BAA.
Adjusting it to approximate the maximum speed of the train, they loaded a dead chicken and fired it at the first windshield design.
The chicken went straight through the windshield, broke several components and left a huge dent in the compartment door. Surprised by the result, they asked a BAA official if they had done the test correctly.
An engineer checked everything and suggested that for their next test they defrost the chicken.
Auto
That’s the best laugh I’ve had in days! Thanks Auto. It just had to be British Rail. 😉
I don’t disagree that the story is purposefully alarming, but I’m not sure about this particular analysis. You may be confusing pixelated edges at various resolutions with image compression artifacts. The affect is more noticeable around contrasting edges.
You can view a higher res version of the above image and zoom in. Although there are still artifacts, I do not see any obvious betrayals of multi-image compositing. Not saying it wasn’t edited, just that it was done well.
I would agree. This is bad journalistic practice – using a picture from 2010 to illustrate a
minor point about a weather event in 2015 but that is a long way to go to claim that the
picture is a fake. I imagine that the reason it was taken was because it was so unusual.
And probably there is more of the ice hiding behind the picture explaining why the structure
is stable and how the penguins got up there.
There is also something not right with the shadows. Where are the penguin shadows? Based on the ice’s shadow we should see similar shadows elsewhere.
Penguins could not get on top of that block of ice unassisted. They can jump out of water. They cannot jump to any significant height on land. The photo is either photoshopped or staged. Either way it is yet another bit of climate hype deception.
In cinema there is the concept of “forced perspective”, where multiple actors can be at different spots in the scene, and with the right camera angle can be filmed to look like they are occupying the same space. Peter Jackson used this technique regularly in his LotR movies to make the actors playing the hobbits look like hobbits despite not actually being 3 1/2ish feet tall (along with other tricks, like using child doubles in shots where they face away from the camera).
So there very well could be a penguin-climbable slope on the backside of the ice mass, hidden via forced perspective. How to Take a Fake Picture with a Real Camera.
Everything about the picture does not jive with penguin behavior. Nor does it jive with the ice placement in an environment where there is no other ice anywhere land or sea. Nonetheless I realized there was an off chance that the penguin reached the top by means not visible. So I uploaded the pic to Fotoforensics and got this picture analysis
http://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=c656885d3c820e556c8a3e5739301d11967b433d.25737&fmt=ela&size=600&i=22157313
The penguins not only looked unusually pixalated, but their pixalation disrupts the upper edge of the ice. In the original the penguins appear behind the upper edge. In the forensics the pixalation bites into the ice and disrupts the edge. With all things considered it appears fake.
Jim, the fotoforensic site, whilst fun, is essentially useless unless you are working on an image straight from the camera. The image that ends up with you has been compressed many many times, and then again by your browser and then again by you as you copy it to do the forensics’ on. It’s a useless gimmick ( source me. Adobe certified expert). You are mistaking jpeg compression artefacts with evidence of photoshopping. As someone who has made countless composite images I can tell you that the ‘evidence’ in your site above appears very different in an actual photoshopped image that has not been around the web a few thousand times. See my post below where I explain that it is a Reuters stock file image.
Not sure your high res version indicates a lack of shopping. Looking at the pixelated edges around the Penguins, it appears that the pixelation has definite larger right angle zones surrounding flippers and heads
Here it is blown up 3x using Irfanview . I think the pixelation around the penguins and even around the ice block is pretty apparent compared to , eg : the horizon .
http://cosy.com/y17/WUWT_FakeMSN_PenguinPic.jpg
@Bob Armstrong. Those are jpeg compression artefacts and are impossible to avoid because of the nature of jpeg compression. Do it with a random sample of images involving a subject taken against a blue sky. I guarantee you in a sample size of suitable jpeg images you will see the same effect >95%
We are supposed to ignore physics and biology and assume the picture is not photoshopped? Sorry. It doesn’t require counting pixels to see that this is manufactured photo.
The ice chunk itself is photoshopped into the frame. The original frame depicts a barren rocky shore.
Reuters has a photo credit from 1/1 2010 and location of pic at Cape Denison, Commonwealth Bay, East Antarctica
“Antarctica contains 90% of the worlds freshwater” is a meaningless statistic. Absolutely zero percent of anyones freshwater comes from Antarctica. It’s another example of abuse of language and data being taken out of context is used to miseducate people.
Gravity-defying ice.
It really is an appalling job, why doesn’t it fall over, the shadow outline on the rocks is ham-fisted and how come is there no sign of any melt water at the base?
?w=720
As for the flooded house it is also a joke, the BS artist had no idea of linear perspective the horizon line being at the water line at the house the camera lens would have been half under water so any foreground should be submerged:
Ah, no, you fail to realise that in the warmist world you can have sloping water. So the picture is correct, and the water level slopes up towards the house…. 😉
R
Sloping water is very common. Sloping water allowed the penguins to swim up onto the ice on the rock.
Cut the heads off of chickens and they can run around like an alarmed warmest.
[Sorry; not nice.]
Very true. As children during butcher day we got to run them down to take them to the boiling water tank for a dip. The feathers were easier to pluck after a plunge. Bloody business as the cut neck would fling blood around as we caught them. I remember it being fun but smelly work.
I mean chickens, not warmists.
Did you flour the immature eggs and deep fat fry them?
Works on ducks, too. It is messy.
What temperature range was measured by the Esperanza sensor on March 24th, 2015?
Maybe 50°F ? Or more?
Good job, Anthony. It seems there has been a sharp increase of climate hype stories that fall apart under even slight scrutiny. This one may be one of the biggest whoppers.