King Island's proposed wind farm, one of the biggest developments of its kind in Australia, looks like it will move forward to second stage planning after 59 per cent of locals supported the scheme. Ketan Joshi, who works in the energy industry, and is qualified in psychology, analyses the furore around turbines and their health effects.
In early 2012, I stood underneath three silent, whirling blades. The wind turbine, half of Australia’s first community owned wind farm, purred quietly in the gentle breeze. My employer had organised a tour as part of a proposed development in Seymour, Victoria. At the time, I was working in a monitoring centre for six different wind farms. I volunteered to join the tour, hoping to address some of the more technical questions about how wind farms work in the national electricity market.
During the question and answer session, a man stepped forward and produced a crumpled piece of paper from his jeans. He demanded to know about infrasound, ultrasound, and electromagnetic radiation. He was concerned about the health impacts of wind energy, and he’d come to voice his apprehension. And, although his questions were disjointed, his anger was real.
Another attendee asked him to step back and give someone else a go. He reluctantly agreed, and walked to the back of the group. As he crouched down, he crammed a small white cigarette into his mouth, and lit it. In a single breath, he consumed 51 unique carcinogens, including carbon monoxide, tar, arsenic, cyanide, acetone, butane, freon and sulphuric acid. Smoking kills more people globally each year than all deaths from illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides and murders combined.
It isn’t weird to be moved by personal testimony. The image of a genuinely distressed human being is likely to make us forget that many of the ailments reported are extremely common in the population. It also makes us forget that determining causality is a complex scientific process, impossible to do solely with anecdotal evidence.
As he clasped the cigarette between his two fingers, sucking carbon monoxide into his internal organs, his other hand held the piece of paper.
The sight of that man drawing lethal chemicals directly into his lungs, whilst glaring at the tall, white turbine, turning slowly in the wind, seemed shocking and simultaneously fascinating, to me.
I had a niggling feeling there were good, scientific reasons behind why he perceived a dangerous thing as harmless, and a harmless thing as dangerous. In my short time in the wind industry, I’ve noticed common themes in the discourse around the health issues that exist for wind energy. Far from the fringe paranoia often attributed to people who believe wind turbines are doing them harm, we mostly see honest individuals who have been taken in by a calculated campaign, designed to exploit several key vulnerabilities of the way we perceive danger. There’s a moral obligation to exercise care about how we communicate risk and science, because it isn’t weird to believe in ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’.
The disease is the brainchild of New York Paediatrician Nina Pierpont, who has a PhD in ornithology. Pierpont is the wife of an anti-wind activist, who states he has been 'fighting the wind bastards for over four years'. In 2006, she put out a call for 'anyone living near wind turbines and suffering ill health effects of whatever sort which he/she suspects are a result of the wind turbines' to contact her. By her own admission, Pierpont assumed that ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’ was a reality before she even began her interviews. The study, involving 38 people, most of whom were interviewed over the phone, was dismissed by the New South Wales Department of Health as 'not scientifically valid, with major methodological flaws stemming from the poor design of the study'. Despite the substantial defects in her self-published study, ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’ has spread to communities in Canada, the United States and Australia.
The loosely defined disease is now the centrepiece of an organised fight against the development of wind farms. Anti-wind groups claim that infrasound, noise below a frequency of twenty hertz and mostly inaudible to human hearing, affects physiology directly, bypassing conscious perception and purportedly triggering a mammoth list of symptoms in people living within ten kilometres of wind turbines.
Simon Chapman, Professor of Public Health at Sydney University, has taken an interest in the phenomenon, and has collected 216 unique symptoms each attributed to the presence of wind turbines. The list ranges from complaints such as headaches, nausea and sleeplessness, to claims of ‘rage attacks’, chicken deformities and the mass death of 400 goats, all associated with the mysterious infrasonic and low-frequency noise emissions of wind energy.
Infrasound from wind turbines can actually be measured. The South Australian Environmental Protection Agency produced a comparative report into infrasound in February this year, finding that infrasound near wind farms is mostly attributable to the wind itself, and is no greater than levels measured in urban and CBD areas. The highest levels of recorded infrasound came from inside the office of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Though wind farm infrasound poses little-to-no risk to residents living near wind farms, health fears seem to arise with increasing intensity with each proposal. Belief in ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’ persists and propagates because the message spread by anti-wind groups successfully exploits several key aspects of the way that we consider risk, science and technology.
The most powerful tool in the arsenal of anti-wind groups is anecdotal evidence. It’s a compelling way of imparting information, but has low standing in terms of scientific veracity. Small but emotionally charged community meetings are often bolstered by groups such as the Landscape Guardians or the Waubra Foundation, and feature direct and passionate testimony from residents who attribute their ill-health to the operation of wind turbines. Stop These Things is an anonymously run anti-wind blog responsible for the organisation of a recent rally in Canberra, as well as films and uploads of interviews with individuals who claim that their health has been affected by wind turbines. They provocatively call these videos ‘Victim Impact Statements’. These are immediately evocative of the ‘Reaction Report Forms’ collated by the anti-vaccination lobby, another pseudoscience that relies heavily on anecdotal evidence to support their claims. The tendency for pseudoscientific ventures to focus solely on anecdote is blatant.
It isn’t weird to be moved by personal testimony. The image of a genuinely distressed human being is likely to make us forget that many of the ailments reported are extremely common in the population. It also makes us forget that determining causality is a complex scientific process, impossible to do solely with anecdotal evidence. Through a focus on anecdotes, the anti-wind lobby present a compelling and entirely effective way of invoking further belief in the danger of infrasound.
In concert with emotional stories of suffering, an unnerving atmosphere of scientific uncertainty is created around the safety of wind energy. Low quality studies, such as Pierpont’s work, are enough to generate a perception of scientific controversy. Recall Andrew Wakefield’s infamous discredited study on the MMR vaccine, responsible for the birth of the anti-vaccination movement. The perception that a risk is ‘poorly understood by science’ can be classified as what’s known as a ‘fright factor’. Researchers at Waterloo University in Canada published a paper this year, showing a recent and statistically significant increase in the framing of ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’ as ‘poorly understood by science’ in regional and capital city newspapers. This ‘fright factor’ can trigger alarm, anxiety and outrage, separated from scientific estimates of risk. It’s something that affects us all – I still feel an occasional pang of unease when I hold a mobile phone centimetres from my brain, recalling news articles suggesting disagreement amongst neuroscientists. The resulting perception, that a technology is likely to be a real risk to health, can prime us to experience that technology very differently.
Confirmation bias is a psychological phenomenon that is ubiquitous in our species. It’s the tendency for us to reject information that conflicts with our beliefs, and over-value evidence that confirms our beliefs. Again, this affects us all. As I walk to the pedestrian crossing near my apartment every morning on the way to work, I swear I always manage to just miss the lights. Maybe it’s not just random – maybe the lights are changing such that I always manage to just miss them. The absurd delusion that Sydney’s traffic network is acting to conspire against me is oddly satisfying – by attributing agency to a relatively meaningless pattern of events, I feel oddly vindicated. There’s no doubt I fail to notice the many times that I actually do make the lights.
It’s astonishing how easy it is to fall into this trap. The effect is so powerful that we need a special methodology to remove the effects of confirmation bias from knowledge that we really value – something we call ‘science’. Without it, we’re at risk of remembering the hits and ignoring the misses. Michael Shermer, American science writer and founder of the Skeptics Society, terms the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise 'patternicity’. Shermer explains that long ago in our evolutionary history, there was real worth in being hyper-vigilant, when it came to detecting potential sources of harm. Mistaking the sound of the wind for a predator was not costly, but mistaking the sound of a predator for the wind was very costly indeed. This seems to be a factor in why stories of health impacts are so captivating to journalists, politicians and concerned residents looking for information about potential wind developments.
A related but more sinister phenomenon may also be contributing to the incidence of health complaints, known as the ‘nocebo’ effect. It’s the inverse of the placebo effect: instead of a sugar pill inducing reports of improved health, a harmless technology might induce reports of ill-health, based on the pre-determined belief that that technology is harmful. British researchers Witthöft and Rubin published a paper in the Journal of Psychomatic Research last December, demonstrating that showing people a film about the adverse health effects of Wi-Fi caused a statistically significant increase in reported symptoms, once these subjects were exposed to a sham Wi-Fi signal.
Fiona Crichton, PhD candidate in psychological medicine at the University of Auckland, exposed two groups of people to real and sham infrasound. One group had seen a video of people recounting their experience of symptoms that they had attributed to wind farms. The other group had seen testimony from experts, explaining that infrasound from wind farms is not likely to cause adverse reactions. Those that had been exposed to the footage of residents attributing their ill-health to wind turbines reported an increased number and intensity of symptoms, regardless of whether they were exposed to real or sham infrasound.
Simon Chapman has also produced a study, currently submitted to an international journal for publication, that examines the prevalence of health complaints around 49 wind farms in Australia, compiled from government submissions, media mentions and the complaints registers of wind energy companies. Chapman estimates there are 32,000 people living within five kilometres of Australia’s wind farms. Of these, 120 individuals have issued complaints of ill-health they attribute to wind energy. Eighty-two per cent of all complaints have arisen since the inception of ‘wind turbine syndrome’ in 2009, and 68 per cent of all complaints are centred around just five wind farms, each of which have been visited by anti-wind groups, spreading the message of ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’. Chapman’s work indicates that ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’ is not as pervasive as the anti-wind lobby asserts, and it also highlights that their message is dangerously effective – complaints of ill-health seem coupled to misinformation, rather than to proximity to wind farms.
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Listen to Ketan Joshi's talk at Ockham's Razor.
It seems logical to respond to concerns about health effects by funding scientific research. It’s a good idea, but it involves large-scale epidemiological studies, which can take many years. In the spell between the dawn of these concerns and the outcomes of epidemiological inquiry, anxiety, fear and trepidation abound, spread further each month by motivated and well-funded anti-wind groups. In the furious maelstrom of public discourse, this is more than enough time to condemn wind energy.
Though wind turbines are unlikely to be the cause of many of the symptoms reported by residents nearby, the experience that residents relay is genuine. To wave their plight away with cruel assignations of hypochondria, delusion and lunacy is to fail to recognise the imperfect way that we all perceive risk in the world. The symptoms reported are real, and concerned citizens have been misled into attributing their maladies to the presence of wind energy, despite a stark absence of evidence for this diagnosis.
To advise a community that wind energy will cause adverse health effects, without a body of scientific evidence to support that claim, is deeply unethical and potentially harmful. I contend we ought to turn a critical and serious gaze towards groups that seek to spread fear and uncertainty, unforgivably divorced from scientific considerations.
On a broader scale, it seems many health scares could be effectively neutered by a wider understanding of science and perception. There’s worth in being sceptical not only of the things we hear, but the things we think – an admission that each and every one of us can be fooled not only by others, but by ourselves, as well.
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