Thursday, June 04, 2015

Faking Before and After Pictures of Wind Turbines

Pierre Gosselin at No Tricks Zone has a post titled, "Shocking Before-And-After Photos: How Wind Parks Are Devastating Idyllic German Countryside!"

Except many, if not all, of one of the pictures in each set of two are clearly fake -- the clouds in each are exactly the same. It was only after some of his readers started pointing this out that Gosselin admitted they were photoshopped:

Shocking!

Gosselin almost always gives a skewed account of climate science and on issues like this one, so this kind of crookedness isn't surprising, except for how obvious it is.

Some of the before and after photos:

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10 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

There's another comment (http://notrickszone.com/2015/06/02/shocking-before-and-after-photos-how-wind-parks-are-devastating-idyllic-german-countryside/comment-page-1/#comment-1029069) which points out that the photos are taken so as to make the turbines look closer than they really are.

Ned W said...

I left the following comment at Wm. Connolley's:

Denialist fake-of-this-week (last week’s) is Faking Before and After Pictures of Wind Turbines at TricksZone, as noticed by David Appell.

I just saw that at DA's. Impressive.

First, any time you're going to doctor photographs to make a point, the doctoring needs to be explained up-front. It's especially ironic that they were posted on a website named "No Tricks Zone".

Having gotten that out of the way, photoshopping to remove the existing wind turbines seems like a reasonable way to do the before/after comparison; better than adding in proposed wind turbines where they don't actually exist, and maybe getting the size or positions wrong.

However ... the real problem is that the photos without the wind turbines "ought" to be paired with images of coal mines, or valleys flooded by dams, or uranium mines, or whatever. Nobody is suggesting building useless wind turbines just to decorate the landscape. The point is that they're reducing the need to obtain electricity from other sources elsewhere.

It would be better not to spoil the views of quaint German villages with wind turbines. It would also be better not to allow those villages to remain unspoiled at the expense of other villages elsewhere that must be destroyed by mines or dams or power plants or whatever.

Unknown said...

maybe someone could add before and after photos of coal mining, maybe a few open pits...

GeoT said...

Just because wind turbines can be removed with PhotoShop doesn't mean they don't blight the landscape! I can't know whether he "added" more turbines than were actually there, but this article implies that new turbines somehow don't exist all over the place (nitpicking one guy's work doesn't change reality). There are over 250,000 wind turbines on the planet now. How can they not affect scenery? Digitally removing wind turbines could be done for any number of landscapes and is perfectly honest when the context is disclosed. The guy who did those photos never claimed otherwise. One needn't have actual photos taken before the wind turbines were built to demonstrate how they alter scenery.

Also, the devious people who keep comparing wind turbines to coal mines, etc. are ignoring the fact that the landscape damage is cumulative, and you don't see mines all over the place because they are limited by geology, and often hidden by hills. Mountaintops are removed all the time (blasted and permanently clear-cut) to build ridge-top wind turbines. See photos of Mars Hill, Lowell Mountain, Laurel Mountain, just to name a few famous U.S. examples. Mines and drilling sites aren't magically vanishing just because wind turbines are built, and the vertical scale and spread of wind turbines makes them far more visible to most people in their daily lives. That's why they get protested so often! "Green" energy sprawl is now the biggest factor in ruining MORE landscapes than ever before, which wouldn't have been developed otherwise. That's just a fact. Fracking and other development is also ugly, but its vertical/visual component isn't nearly as large as the wind turbine plague.

David Appell said...

Would you rather live near a coal power plant or near a wind turbine?

GeoT said...

That's a bogus question because those coal plants already exist and are a different type of impact. You know that wind power is invading areas far from most coal plants, so you're just trying to change the subject back to old damage from new. Stick with the actual topic to be relevant. The damage is cumulative and multi-layered, not just "clean wind" vs. "dirty coal." It's all dirty in its own way.

GeoT said...

Again, you ignore the obvious encroachment of wind turbines on areas that would never be affected by fossil fuel development. At least drop the diversions long enough to admit that many people find them ugly for good reason. You and the other faux environmentalists don't get to decide for the masses what is or isn't nice to look at or listen to.

GeoT said...

Funny you should mention distance, since most photos of wind turbines deliberately make them look small compared to foreground objects. And you inject the strange notion that wind turbines are somehow shifting back and forth to accommodate whoever might be viewing them from a given distance or angle. Just admit that they are huge construction projects that anger a lot of people, and future plans for more and more of them are ominous.

David Appell said...

Geo, I'm sorry, I can't understand what your point is.

These pictures from Pierre Gosselin are fake.

And he admitted it.

David Appell said...

Geo wrote:
"At least drop the diversions long enough to admit that many people find them ugly for good reason."

You know what I find ugly?

The smog created by your use of fossil fuels.

And the climate change created for the next 100,000 years by your (and my) use of fossil fuels.