Environmentalists Use Photoshop and Fraud to Deceive

Watts Up With That has a funny instance of warmist deception. You may have seen the headline, I did: Antarctica hits record high temperature at balmy 63.5°F. Where? Base Esperanza. Where is Base Esperanza in relation to what we normally think of as Antarctica? A long, long distance away:

Base Esperanza is close to Tiera Del Fuego and not far from Africa, so warm temperatures there are not exactly shocking. Plus, the weather phenomenon that caused the recent high temperature is well understood and has nothing to do with global warming:

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. [About 25 degrees Fahrenheit] 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 as regards penguins.

Now we get to the really fun part: the photo that accompanied the alarmist MSN article:

This alleged picture is very silly. Having lived in Minnesota for more than 40 years, I am an expert in how piles of snow and ice melt. They don’t melt from the bottom, leaving a shape like an anvil that–I suppose–eventually topples over. They melt from the top, leaving a gentle mound, such as I see in the cul-de-sac in front of my house every spring. The one way a formation might look like this is if it is being worn away at the bottom by waves. But that, of course, has nothing to do with global warming.

Then, too: what are the penguins doing on top of that weird anvil formation? As Jim Steele points out, “Climbing such a structure would be a difficult technical climb for an experienced mountaineer.” Are we to assume that the penguins have been there for weeks or months as the snow under them melted weirdly away? No. Penguins go into the ocean to hunt, daily. More from Steele and WUWT:

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 resolutions that have been overlain.

So the whole thing is a fake.

It is fun to trace the provenance of the photoshopped penguins. Before that photo was on MSN, it was published by the Christian Science Monitor in June 2016. But it originated with Reuters.

On Google Images, we find that it was published by Reuters on January 1, 2010, so it had nothing to do with any alleged warm spell at Base Esperanza in 2017. The caption says:

Two Adelie penguins stand atop a block of melting ice on a rocky shoreline at Cape Denison, Commonwealth Bay, in East Antarctica January 1, 2010.

That is not, as noted, a “block of melting ice.” And Cape Denison is over by Australia, thousands of miles from the site of the allegedly alarming global warming at Camp Esperanza. The photoshopping apparently dates back to the original Reuters photo, something that the folks at Reuters should look into.

Global warming “science” is a joke. It isn’t science, it is pure politics. And photoshopping is, sadly, the least of the alarmists’ sins.