9 out of 10 tents are empty? Bullshit.
by Alex Hern
So you may have seen the claim, made by the Times, Telegraph and BBC Radio 5 (possibly others – and I’m sure these three sources have multiplied like mad) that nine out of ten tents at Occupy London are empty.
I call bullshit.
The source given by all three is infrared footage from a police helicopter. Already, two of the three raise questions – both the Times and Radio 5 incorrectly attribute it to the Met, when in fact the City of London police shot it. The Times has a helpful screencap:
What they are arguing, then, is that the glowing tent in the middle has someone in it; that all the black ones don’t; and that this pattern is repeated throughout the camp.
The telegraph attempt to go one better, and have a video of the camp, shot with IR:
But hang on. What’s that we see in the Telegraph video?
Most tents are opaque to infrared.
This is, of course, to be expected; heat escapes through infrared, and it would be a pretty poor tent that didn’t attempt to keep at most of the heat inside. In fact, if you watch the video again, you can tell which tents are insulated and which aren’t: some are translucent, and some are opaque.
There is no way that counting the number of glowing orange tents in footage such as this can tell you how many tents are actually occupied.
Knowing this, I was curious as to where this figure of nine out of ten tents being empty had come from. So I called City of London police. They confirmed that they had not claimed that statistic (and confirmed that they had produced the footage, putting at least one confirmed piece of bullshit in the Times story). I also got a confirmation from another source that this footage would not be appropriate to draw these conclusions.
Now, reading the ledes, it is at least the case that no one has actually attributed this claim to the police. The Times is typical:
Nine out of ten of the tents outside St Paul’s Cathedral are empty, thermal images gathered from police helicopters suggest.
Of course, the images suggest no such thing. But who thought they did? Well, there is one other constant between the Times and Telegraph stories, and that is the presence of Matthew Richardson, a councillor in the Corporation of London. And sure enough, he provides the money quote:
Thermal imaging has shown that most of those tents are empty — about 90 per cent. It just shows that the majority of people don’t have the conviction to stay here. They are here to cause trouble, and leaving a tent here is a way to do that.
The 90 per cent figure is clearly pulled out of his arse, and not some scientific conclusion, as the Telegraph’s “it can be revealed” suggests; and even if he had bothered to actually count the number of tents, the claim cannot be supported by the evidence.
This is shoddy, shoddy journalism, and the Times, Telegraph and BBC should retract the stories.
Odds and Ends 
Either that or the glowing tents have some kind of heating
Unfortunately, that argument doesn’t hold up. It is true that the tents are opaque to heat and thus will hide the presence of someone standing behind them. But when a tent is occupied, the tent itself warms up, and that’s what makes it glow in IR.
That’s why the glowing tents are glowing tent shapes, not tents with a glowing person shape inside them. You’re not seeing the heat of a person through the tent fabric, you’re seeing the warm fabric of the tent itself.
Well said Mark!
A lot of these protesters/supporters are just argumentative (ex-)students nit picking their way through life thinking they actually have more rights than they do.
When they anarchists eventually get what they want (one way or another) they’ll quickly realise life suddenly became less rosy!
No, it’s heat *escaping* the tent which makes it glow in IR, a decently insulated tent won’t do this much, and if the person is in a sleeping bag then it will be even less likely. Also, as pointed out in the Guardian at http://tinyurl.com/5slvlmf, the fact that the people walking about have a range of heat rather than being at the most extreme end of the detection suggests that the cameras haven’t been calibrated to pick up the lower levels of heat the tents would be giving off, they’ve just been left either on a default setting or on auto (which would adjust so that the images of people outside the tents don’t get washed out)
Any experienced camper will tell you that “four season” tents that are designed for extreme conditions still have vents which leak heat. They are also very expensive and I doubt these folks have them or they are not truly the 99%. Even in a sleeping bag, a person’s hot breath will warm a tent. I’m sure you are justifying your belief in the movement but you really need to learn more about science…
to heat up a tent would require occupancy for a sustained period. i would be surprised if many occupationists went to bed before midnight.
Other points:
– That clearly was not taken from a helicopter, but from the steps of the cathedral itself, you can tell by the angle.
– Much more likely the footage of the reporter of the telegraph reporter found harassing people that evening, see here: http://occupylsx.org/?p=408
– I can see my own tent in that photo (easy to tell using the ‘capitalism’ banner as a reference point) and I know I was in it that night :P
Fuck off out of out city you smelly cunts
This is one of those invent a *fact* and build a whole load of conjecture around it stories.
Mark: You are right that even the IR-translucent tents still show a glow rather than a clear outline, but I ask you to rewatch the telegraph video, which corroborates what my police source told me: IR cameras are not fit for the purpose that the Telegraph & Times claimed they were. You can’t tell how many tents are occupied with them.
Wulfy: The telegraph footage is indeed shot by them, not a helicopter; I should have made that clearer in the piece. Never the less, it serves to illustrate the point, and I have been assured that the police camera does not have some magic “see through tents” function that a normal IR camera doesn’t.
@A
Nobody is in “out city” as far as I’m aware, don’t worry, you were probably dreaming. I don’t think anyone knows where out city is do they?
The first image isn’t a screencap, it’s a mock-up, an illustration.
“The source given by all three is infrared footage from a police helicopter. Already, two of the three raise questions – both the Times and Radio 5 incorrectly attribute it to the Met, when in fact the City of London police shot it.”
City of London police don’t have any helicopters, so you also misattribute it, it may have been shot on their behalf but it will have been by the Met.
You misunderstand the technology here.
Tents are opaque to heat but the technology is not seeing through the tents, it is seeing the temperature of the tents.
In reality that is the temperature of the air in the tent from someone inside breathing.
Its true that different shades will be seen dependent upon the temperature in the tent and the degree of insulation but any tent with someone in it will be some degree brighter than black.
The technology clearly works.
That many dissemble demonstrates this is a significant issue to the protesters.
[…] comments and responses to my piece yesterday, as well as Occupy London’s official statement, a few other explanations have come to light […]
I walked through the tents the other day on my way to a sushi restaurant. Some of them had mini solar panels outside of them to provide electricity inside the tent. Mini solar panels, I tells ya!
Clearly 90% of protesters are zombies, and the entire camp needs to be napalmed on the grounds of public safety.
[…] 9 out of 10 tents are empty? Bullshit. « Paul Newman’s Eyes. […]
[…] time they went to press for today’s papers, that claim would no longer fly; not only can you not tell if a tent is occupied with an IR camera, their only source was rapidly recanting his words: A local […]
You are obviously clueless about how “thermal” imaging works. It’s not an xray.
Maybe the protesters have discovered that pound shops sell ‘silver’ space-blankets (that have been around since about 1975 !). Aluminised mylar foil is very effective at reflecting heat – great between the inner + outer skins of a decent tent ! Maybe 10% only have single-skinned tents ? Far from conclusive. Thermal imaging only shows two things – the temperature of the surface X the ’emissivity’ of the surface. Generally a black surface will give off more heat, a white or silver one will give off less. The first photo seems calibrated to show a 17 degrees celsius temperature at the red triangle. My urban bedroom was at 13 degrees last week – I guess the couple in the tent are generating considerable heat somehow.
If the tents were empty that would be good thing because it might imply that the worthless layabouts had jobs, which of course they do not .
No ,they are in their tents , they do not go to work, they exist on benefits and 99% of the population would rather let a baby play with a food blender than let their views and attitudes anywhere near the countries Economic policy or laws .
Harmless but faintly irritating
btw Paul Newman is my name also really …
Deception is not a minor or a marginal moral failure.
Once there was a day when the probity of the BBC was not in question, it was an honest, trustworthy source of news; even Russian presidents tuned in.
“Anti-capitalist demonstrators”, really? Not just a people wanting their national economy back from a greedy, opportunistic minority that had stewardship of their savings, but decided to help themselves instead?
These are not “anarchist” or “Communist” or any other “-ists” to be easily dismissed. They have a point about financial justice, when the law and politicians are lacking
Sadly, now it’s the BBC with the empty lies, fabrications redolent of cold war propaganda, and absurd peeping Toms featured in the Daily Telegraph rather than the News of the World.
A dark tent is one that has is either unoccupied or has not been occupied long enough to show a temp differential with the ambient air. Frankly, it may be convenient to say that the claim is BS, but the blog author gives insufficient reason to “call BS” on the Telegraph.
Even if the “resident” lined the tent with what we used to call a “space blanket” it would not keep an IR camera from seeing a temp differential from ambient. It would simply take a bit longer to show up.
IR cameras simply show temperature differentials, they are not “x-ray” machines. A tent will, however, show up as occupied because it will be warmer than the surrounding air and will radiate in the infra-red spectrum. The guy’s leg that disappears when it is masked by the tent is because the tent material is opaque in infra-red, but that’s about all that’s accurate in the post.