timeimmortal

I alluded, yesterday, to the possibility that a conviction of Maclean’s by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal could have sweeping, national implications — despite the fact that in theory, HRCs don’t recognize or rely on precedent, and despite the fact that the BCHRT has no jurisdiction outside of British Columbia.

Ezra Levant today gives an example of a ruling handed down by the Alberta Human Rights Commission that demonstrates what that effect could possibly look like. It’s…damning, really, as it demonstrates that an HRC has appointed to itself the power to, in effect, demand that a person renounce his beliefs (because let us be honest: if one is not free to articulate one’s beliefs, is one really free to hold them in the first place?).

A Christian pastor [Stephen Boissoin]has been given a lifetime ban against uttering anything “disparaging” about gays. Not against anything “hateful”, let alone something legally defined as “hate speech”. Just anything negative.

So a pastor cannot give a sermon.

[Rather,] he must give a false sermon; he is positively ordered to renounce his deeply held religious beliefs, and apologize to his tormentor for having those views.

And then that pastor is ordered to declare to his entire city that he has renounced his religious views, even though he has not.

That’s Alberta’s human rights commission. That’s the group where 15 bureaucrats are busily beavering away against me, because I published some Danish cartoons two years ago.

That’s the same “law” under which Maclean’s and Mark Steyn are charged.

I got into an argument once in which I made a crack about American ignorance of all things Canadian (the specific assertion I was responding to was my opponent’s implication that all of Canada experienced a two-month (8 week) stretch of the year in which the Sun did not rise). My opponent responded that I should be careful about making such cracks, in case the Yanks ever decided to invade hapless Canada.

I joked to him that he was presuming too much; specifically, I said, he presumed that I would view American invasion as a bad thing.

Would I? Especially in light of these rulings, I have to ask: would I?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

I’m trying something new with this post; I’ve tweaked the site a bit so that the most recent Pic of the Day is always the top post. Since it’s the only more-or-less assuredly regular feature of the site, I figured it should take prominence.

But hey, I don’t want to leave the good Reader hanging either. At the top of this post, there is a link to the main content, which begins just below.

This is a shot of the underside supports of…I guess it would be an observation platform near the dock we were at for the birthday party. That’s not really important; it was mostly empty, and we didn’t exactly go up there. But the support struts on the underside of the dock, partially backlit by the Sun and with more water in the illuminated area beyond the shadow, did make for an interesting picture.

Edit-wise, this shot got a fairly standard battery of adjustments, including the calibration/Punch preset and some massive highlight recovery adjustments; the background was rather over-exposed. I also applied some fill light, to bring out a few details in the columns.

Here’s one more shot of the fishing trawlers in Steveston.

I kind of violated what I am trying to make into a rule for myself: where possible, and except in case of sunrise or sunset photos, do not shoot into the Sun. And while technically the Sun is off to the right in this picture, I still had a lot of highlight recovery to do to get this image back into the “acceptable” category.

That said, the edits did work out rather well, enough so that I decided to post the picture on the ol’ blog here. There’s lots of details in this shot — riggings, divots and pits on the hulls of the ships, and so forth — that really give the eye lots to wander over.

Edit-wise, in addition to the aforementioned highlight recovery and a host of saturation adjustments to get rid of some harsh chromatic aberration (and to restore colour lost in the highlight reduction process), I applied a fair bit of sharpening to firm up some of the fine detail. I thought, briefly, about messing with the Clarity as well, but chose, in the end, to leave it at the preset’s default value of 50.

Once again, I’m kind of jumping back and forth in time, although this time only by a matter of hours (if that much). This picture is the ferry terminal at Horseshoe Bay, taken perhaps thirty minutes before the ferry departed for Vancouver Island.

The reason this image took a bit longer to arrive is that it is an attempt at a high dynamic range (or simply HDR) image. The concept behind HDR is basically to present an image in which both a darker foreground and a brighter background are in detail, with neither of the two being either washed out and overexposed, or dark and underexposed.

In layman’s terms, I suppose you could say that what HDR is is an attempt to make the camera see what the human eye sees when looking at a scene.

The plain fact of the matter is that the dynamic range (the “space” between the darkest value that a camera can record and the brightest value it can record) of most cameras is substantially less than that of the human eye.

So whereas we might look at a scene with our eyes and see a bright Sun in a blue sky behind a tree on which we can see the colour of the branches and the leaves, in a photo of same we will either see the detail on the tree in front of a washed out, bright white sky, or else we will see the Sun in a blue sky behind a dark, essentially black tree.

HDR photography uses one or more of several techniques to get around this limitation. Some forms of HDR attempt to use bracketing to combine several images, each at a different exposure level, into one cohesive picture that looks “right”. Other workarounds include the use of neutral density filters of proper magnitude at appropriate angles. Lacking both good HDR software and a graduated neutral density filter, I opt for a third method: taking a mid-tone picture and using Lightroom’s surprisingly power curves tool to effectively create a pseudo-HDR image.

Edit-wise, I began by doing a lot of highlight reduction on this shot, using both Lightroom’s built-in Recovery tool and the Tone Curve tool as well; almost all the bright highlights were stripped out of the picture. This was enough to restore detail not only to the sky, but to the clouds as well (note the subtle gradiations of grey amidst the white). I also used the Fill Light tool in Lightroom, which brightens darker tones, and then darkened some of the shadows again to restore contrast detail.

Finally, I applied my calibration/Punch preset, some noise reduction (always a good idea after that many level adjustments), and a bit of chromatic aberration correction to round out the edits. I toyed with the Clarity a bit, and thought briefly about doing this shot “diffusion print” style, but instead settled on a Clarity value of 50 (the default for the Punch preset).

This was a shot that I honestly didn’t think would work out; my past experiments with HDR have only occasionally ended successfully. That said, I was pleasantly surprised with how well this picture did turn out, and I’m going to have to remember everything I did that made this one turn out right, because I know I’ll want to do it again.

I tried another shot of the tree in Grace’s grandparents’ back yard on one of the few days during our vacation that we actually got a glimpse of blue skies. The Sun was setting when I took this, and one can discern — through the maze of branches — a fiery orange hue cast upon the upper part of the tree.

Much like the previous shot of this tree that I attempted, this shot was taken with my lens set to its widest possible setting (17 mm), which I prefer to avoid the use of when I can but which, under certain circumstances, can work out for me if I’m careful. Principally, I’m worried about barrel distortion, which on the lens in question can be quite pronounced at its shallowest focal length. Equally, though, the problem of intense chromatic aberration (especially at the borders of the photo) looms large at 17 mm.

And it was the chromatic fringing that I had to adjust for in Lightroom — this eventually required me to reduce the purple and magenta saturations to -100, and even then I don’t think I managed to clean all the offending flared colour out of the picture.

Other edits to this shot included heavier noise reduction, owing to the fact that I was shooting at ISO 800 (which is pretty high on the EOS 350D. I applied the usual calibration/Punch preset as well, to bring out the colour. And I also boosted the green and blue saturations a fair bit. Lastly, the sky required some fairly hefty highlight reduction. In spite of all the tweaking that had to be done, though, the picture itself turned out really well, for which I’m grateful.

Perhaps I will sound trite for saying this, but there are a lot of very interesting buildings in Vancouver.

This is, I think, the tower at the Central City Shopping Centre in Surrey, in the glow of the setting Sun. The design of the building is, to say the very least, eye-catching, and its all-glass exterior plays with the light in wonderful ways.

Edit-wise, this picture received the standard battery of adjustments — sharpening, the calibration/Punch preset, and a touch of noise reduction and chromatic aberration correction. Initially, I was tempted to try and give it a “diffusion print” look by bumping the Clarity setting down to -100, but instead went the opposite direction and boosted the Clarity to +100 (Punch, by default, sets Clarity to +50). And then, because the colour was better, I switched from the standard colour calibration settings to the “Vivid” settings that I rarely, but sometimes, make use of.

And I have to say, I like the results. The lines of the tower, especially, are very sharp, and the colours rich. And then there’s the tower itself, which I think is just fascinating to look at.

Here’s an image in which I’ve heavily adjusted the saturations of the colours — everything but red has been more or less reduced to nothingness (a bit of orange, purple, and magenta were kept). I took the shot, initially, because I liked the lines of the scene and the way the sunlight was refracting through the glasses on the table. It proved to be a fun one to play with in post-processing, as well.

I grabbed this shot at a Chinese restaurant favoured by Grace’s grandparents, and I like to think of it as a testament to the power that seemingly innocuous things — curtains, in this particular example — have over image colour quality. Functionally, this image looks almost the same with or without all the colours save red removed from it; in fact, I think it looks truer to life when only the red is left in the image.

This is because of two competing factors, both of which can negatively affect image quality. The first, of course, is the source of light in the room (the Sun) and the fact that the light has to filter through red-tinted curtains . The second is white balance, and the EOS 350D’s attempt to compensate for the colour cast it detects in the scene. Taken together, these competing factors produced an initial image that was, shall we say, less than good.

Fortunately, Lightroom gives me very tight control over colour in an image.

In addition to the saturation adjustments, I applied a lot of noise reduction (the camera was at a high ISO setting again) and some sharpening to round things out a bit.

Here’s yet another building in Vancouver — this one being, if memory serves, the Fairmont Waterfront hotel.

Grace wanted me to get a picture of the building with the various flags in the foreground. Honey: here you go!

And really, the shot turned out well; the tower is backlit by the Sun somewhat, but not too harshly; it wasn’t anything a little bit of highlight reduction (and some artificial vignetting) couldn’t cure. Nothing is washed out, and nothing is underexposed. And the colour depth!

Edit-wise, after applying the usual calibration/Punch preset and some sharpening, I adjusted the shadow intensity a bit, and was pleasantly surprised by the results; a lot of the colours shifted into very pleasant, darker and richer hues. Deciding to take things a bit further afield, I switched my calibration settings to a “Vivid” setting that I cribbed from this article at LightroomNews.

That did it; I especially love the colour of the sidewalk (bottom, foreground) and the building windows. This shot really came alive in post.

Update: Can someone please tell me why the heck this picture is so popular? I want to know what I got right!

Which leaves unanswered, I suppose, the question of why warming trends analogous to trends observed on Earth have been observed on other planets in the Solar System, most notably Mars. It also leaves unanswered, one must note, the question of why most of the observed global average temperature increases have been undone in recent months, corresponding to the observation that the Sun, having finished one sunspot cycle, has not begun another one (contrary to expectations).

The article’s headline is a bit misleading, methinks. The specific solar radiation under discussion is what are called cosmic rays, the really intense radiation that the Sun gives off. Most of that stuff gets blocked by the Earth’s magnetic field anyhow — one of those beautifully-designed things, you know? Of course, cosmic rays are not the only sort of radiation emitted by the Sun, and radiation in other parts of the spectrum can penetrate the magnetic field (ultraviolet radiation would be an easy example to point to here).

The fact is, we can be fairly certain that what solar radiation does penetrate the magnetic field must be responsible for warming the Earth, because we are fairly certain that were the Sun to suddenly stop emitting said radiation, the Earth would become a frozen wasteland. Whatever solar radiation gets through the magnetic field is responsible, in large measure, for the fact that the temperature in most places on the Earth’s surface is in a range that humans find liveable. It still seems reasonable, even in light of findings which suggest that Henrik Svensmark may have been wrong in his theories about cosmic rays, that variations in the Sun’s output in other spectra still do produce changes in the Earth’s climate and average temperature.

Especially, I note again, since similar trends have been observed on other orbital bodies in the Solar System which, last time I checked, were not home to advanced, industrialized societies.

The Anchoress has a beatiful reflection by Thomas Merton posted.

“I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the Sun.”

Maybe one day the atheists will demonstrate conclusively that they are correct, and that all Religions are just ancient superstitions with no basis in reality. But until that day, and for forever afterwards, they will never be able to appreciate the beauty of humanity in the same way that Christians, especially, can and do.

I sometimes imagine that atheists, upon realizing this, become very afraid of religion.

It’s time for another panoramic, I think.

As usual, I composed this with Hugin, and as has become the norm with Hugin, it took very little time to produce once I had all the images prepped. I’m a little bit dissatisfied with the cloud colour toward the right of the frame, and tried to balance exposure and colour tones in Lightroom, but didn’t quite get things there. C’est la vie — I’ve got the originals, so I might go back and revisit the shot later. What’s interesting is that the colours in the orange of the sunset line up with the neighbouring images — I suspect that the aberration in the clouds there might have something to do with the buildings in the distance casting a long shadow as the Sun dipped below the horizon.

That nitpick aside, however, I do like the picture — sunsets on partly cloudy days can, under the right circumstances, look just awesome, and this one was particularly fiery. It didn’t need any tweaking to orange, yellow, or red saturation, although I did a bit anyhow just because I like to eke as much colour out of an image as I can.

Mike Brock has an interesting analysis of changes in average global temperature relative to changes in solar activity. While a lot of people still attempt to downplay the role of the Sun in changes in Earth’s climate (sidetracking the discussion into things like CO2 and methane), the best evidence we have still seems to suggest, in no uncertain terms, that all the gases humanity can pump into the air count for almost nothing compared to the effect that the Sun has on Earth’s climate.

Indeed, since the ending of the last solar cycle, since which time no new sunspots — a good indicator of an active star — have been observed, the Earth’s global average temperature has reversed almost all of the 0.6 C rise above “average” that was observed at about this time last year.

That’s not to say that humanity should just pump industrial and agricultural emissions into the atmosphere all willy-nilly — that would be stupid, because some of those emissions have other harmful effects not related to global warming (although others are mostly harmless). We should do our best to curb the emission of substances which cause, for example, cancers or respiratory maladies. But there is no point in trying our damndest to break otherwise healthy, functioning Western economies in pursuit of a phantom goal of “reversing” a trend over which we have no control anyhow.

It might have seemed timely that in New York an array of leading climatologists and other experts should have gathered for the most high-powered international conference yet to question the “consensus” on global warming. After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming.

This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced NASA’s Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

On his website, Watts Up With That, he is currently posting a corrected version of the global temperature graph, combining satellite and surface data from all four main official sources. A measure of his scrupulous reporting is that although this shows a recent dramatic dip in temperatures, he cautiously explains that it is not yet conclusive evidence that the world has entered a new cooling phase (as he points out, there was temporarily an even sharper drop after the “peak” El Niño year 1998).

But can we doubt that, if the data showed the opposite, the media would be rushing to report this as yet further “proof” that the planet is heating out of control? The fact is that, for all their caveats that this drop in temperatures can be explained by the cooling effect of La Niña, the official orthodoxy that “more CO2 means more warming” is facing its most serious challenge yet. In light of the colossal price we are all in so many ways being asked to pay for it, the data in coming years will be more than interesting.

One cannot, hopefully, have failed to notice that the climate change alarmism movement has become a moneymaking enterprise for some, while for others it has become a vehicle through which policies of massive state intervention in industry — that is, socialism — is demanded and advocated for. The science upon which the movement is based is shoddy and uncertain at best (if not outright an outright fallacy in many respects), and the outcomes of the changes that folks like Al Gore and David Suzuki are demanding would be crippling and disastrous.

It’s a good thing, then, that more and more evidence is now coming to light demonstrating just what kind of lies are being told to us, the Western public.

This is another Lensbaby image, although not one taken within Edmonton.

The Rover Crew periodically retreats to “The Den,” a little cabin we have on Scout land about an hour’s drive outside of Edmonton. The walk in takes us through a nice patch of forest, which is usually good for a photo or five, as was certainly the case here. It was afternoon when we arrived on site — a perfect time of day to catch the Sun filtering through the trees as it wound its way down toward the horizon.

The nice thing about outdoor shots, especially with the EOS 350D, is that they require very little in the way of post-production work. I touched up the shadows and highlights a bit in this shot, and deepened the blues a little, but for the most part the image you see here is what came out of the camera in the first place.

Count Roland writes in again with some follow-up regarding my previous response to him.

Agreed.

But the hypothesis was looking at the methane produced by large swaths of putrifying organic matter, as in vast rice paddies. Also, the period of NA buffalo depopulation coincides with the tail end (1700-1850) of a deepening mini ice age between ~1300 and ~1900. At the begininng of that, likely somehow related, the bl;ack death eliminated populations in Eurasia, likely impacting rice production among other things, reducing methane as well.

Also, it did not say that human induced methane production caused global warming - it said that such production slowed global cooling such that by now, given solar output, a pivot point for the commencement of an ice should be well past but we have not arrived at it, yet. But then again, perhaps the sun is acting a little differently this cycle.

However, a point that can be gleened from this hypothesis. If it is solar activity that is the principal factor and is in a ‘downward’ general cycle with some upticks (we are talking 1000’s and 100’s of years respectively) our human global warming, as little as it may be, may be the only barrier between us and and ice age which would cover most of the developed world with ice. Another way to say this is to remember that the last hundred years’ supposed “hockey stick” is but a fraction of an average glacial cycle let alone the longer solar cycles we have yet to gather the data for. Last time I checked, looking at the smallest fraction - a prooftext, of data and giving a conclusion is not good science.

I think the maxim “correlation does not imply causation” is relevant here with regard to the observation of the correlation between buffalo depopulation (1700-1850 AD) and the “tail end” of a “mini ice age” (1300-1900 AD), especially since a) the aforementioned “mini ice age” was already long in progress by the time buffalo depopulation began, and b) while significant, buffalo were not the only source of methane production in the world, and it seems suspect to suggest that even as catastrophic a decline in population as they underwent would precipitate sweeping changes in global average temperature, especially since by the time the buffalo were being hunted to the brink of extinction, the rice paddies would have been back in action.

There is also to be considered the observation that post-1850, the “mini ice age” came to an end (i.e. temperatures began to rise), even though the buffalo herds were no longer churning out massive quantities of methane (and at the time, cattle farming wouldn’t have made up the shortfall; it doesn’t even manage to do that today). One could potentially point to the Industrial Revolution as the culprit in this case, although given the analysis that has been done about the insignificance of CO2 and other industrial emissions as a driver of global temperature change, that thesis also falls deeply into question.

It serves to note that the Sun is only now coming to the end of an unusually energetic cycle that has, among other things, triggered warming trends on other planets in our solar system, Mars and Neptune to name but two. That diminishment in solar activity has already triggered a downward shift in global average temperature that has more or less undone the warming trend that Al Gore et. al. were so up in arms about, as one would expect if one accepts the theory that CO2 does almost nothing to affect changes in global average temperature, and that the Sun effects profound changes in same.

I also question whether it is humanity’s minimal contribution to changes in the average global temperature that stave off a coming ice age; personally, I tend to think that even under the most carefully controlled conditions, nature will do whatever it damn well pleases. Yes, there are cyclical patterns in climate, as there are in many things, but those patterns can shift for any number of reasons. The Sun has been unusually active for the last while, and is now entering a phase where it is much less energetic than it has been. This may trigger a mild drop in the global average temperature, or it may trigger an extreme drop in same, thus ushering in a new ice age. Either way, I don’t think anything humanity does, in terms of emissions, will offset the results to any meaningful extent. It has been said that even if humanity ceased all CO2 production (even from out of our own lungs), we would have an effect on the global average temperature that one would need percents of percents to measure properly — i.e. statistically and quantitatively insignificant. Even if methane had a hundred times the impact of CO2 in the atmosphere, cutting all our methane emissions would still only result in a change in global average temperature of a percent, or perhaps a few percent (if we were lucky).

If humanity wanted to really stave off a coming ice age, we’d find a way to maximize our production of water vapour, since it is vapour that contributes the most to the atmosphere’s ability to retain heat. But even then — next to the natural water cycles of the planet, our contribution at present is almost meaningless, and it would be a mighty effort indeed to change that.

Count Roland writes in some commentary with regards to this article about global warming, climate change, and CO2’s negligible effect on changes in the average global temperature.

Well, CO2 may not be as big a force as once thought.

However, I remember seeing at least a hypothesis that human activity has stopped the next ice age for another reason, and a reason with much more powerful greenhouse gases involved. The increased methane production from thousands of years of domesticated animals and from rice and other water/organic material intensive farming, not to mention systematic transformation of forest into farmland has had a much greater impact - in slowing a temperature drop over the past several thousand years. If I remember correctly, the hypothesis tracked global temperatures (from ice cores and others) and indicators of caqrbon, methane, sunlight and found that sunlight and temperature and the rest tracked together and should have us living on ice right now if not for human activity.

We may be alive only because of human global warming (aside from God’s grace). But, the big ball of fusing hydrogen and things like galactic and atmospheric dust [does] have a much bigger impact (witness the ‘year without summer’ after a rather large volcanic eruption in the 1800’s) than our cars. Now, we should, perhaps, limit our comsumption of materials for other stewardship related reasons such as sustainability…

I distinctly remember a radio show some years ago, in which David Suzuki was giving an interview in regard to methane production from agriculture in North America. His assertion rather matched Roland’s assertion, that human livestock farming and its attendant methane production (let’s face it, O Reader — cows are quite flatulent) was causing a rise in the average global temperature. The interview was going along quite well, until one caller phoned in with a question about North America before humanity’s major emergence there. We don’t know exactly how large the buffalo herds were, but even during the first few decades of European colonization, what figures we have on those populations suggest that there were more buffalo in North America back then than there are cattle in North America today. And buffalo, this caller reminded Dr. Suzuki, are both much larger and much more flatulent than cattle. And yet we observe, in the historic temperature record, that temperatures fluctuated quite a lot between those years and the modern era.

The caller was quite particular on that point, and David Suzuki had to beat a hasty retreat from the points he’d been making, conceding that yes, there were many more buffalo back then than there are cattle today, and that yes, there would have been a lot more methane produced by those much larger herds.

In one sense, I do agree with Roland about methane production — it is a stronger contributor to global warming than CO2 is. At the same time, it’s still not a strong contributor — the major culprit is water vapour. And there is very little that humanity can do to limit or control vapour levels in the atmosphere, anymore than we could do anything to stop the rain when it comes. I also do agree with Roland that there, but for the grace of God, humanity goes. I even agree that, for reasons of stewardship, humanity should be careful in its use of resources for any number of reasons; we ought not to be wasteful, we ought not to be gluttonous, and we ought to care for the world that God has given to us. We ought to care for each other, furthermore, by limiting to all reasonable extents the quantity of truly harmful pollutants that we put into the atmosphere; sulfur dioxide, for example.

At the same time, I continue to doubt that humanity makes a meaningful contribution to global warming; we’re fairly insignificant as regards biomass to begin with, and most of the emissions from our industrial processes, even the ones that are harmful to us to breathe, are not major contributors to the atmosphere’s ability to retain heat. Even our production of water vapour is, as I understand it, rather insignificant next to the naturally occurring vapour from the planet’s water cycle. This is equally true as regards methane; there was a time in history where the animals of the Earth, roaming freely, produced vastly increased amounts of methane as compared to what we see produced by livestock today — during those centuries, the Earth’s temperature fluctuated quite a lot, at times rising well above the point at which the global average temperature is at today, and at times dipping well below same.

For an explanation of those cycles, I still look to the Sun.