Environmentalist == liar?

Pretty much. Photoshopped scare photos all over the Net. From Watts Up With That?:
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Photoshopping in the “worseness”

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Anthony Watts

 

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.


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He gives some examples of how easy it is to fake things:
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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.

1. highlight a part of the steam with the point to point select tool
2. feather it
3. 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.

Eggborough cooling towers Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

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?

Seen at Ace of Spades