The draft Information Paper provides a summary of the available scientific evidence. Based on the evidence, the paper concludes that “there is no reliable or consistent evidence that wind farms directly cause adverse health effects in humans.”
Wind Noise, Health, & Safety
This report takes the number of reviews published on the issue since 2003 to 20. And all have reached the same broad conclusions.
Since 1998 there have been 45 hearings held under rules of legal evidence in at least five English-speaking countries and four types of courts regarding wind energy, noise and health. Forty-four assessed the evidence and found no potential for harm to human health, and the sole outlier is an instructive but unique case.
The UBA study found 13.8% of land area suitable for wind energy; 49,000 km2, and that with contemporary wind turbines there is the astonishing 1,200,000 MW capable of generating 2,900 TWh/yr. This is nearly five times Germany’s current consumption of electricity. The study was done by Fraunhofer-Institute for Wind Energy in Kassel (IWES).
Over the past five years, a few anti-wind campaigners with credentials unrelated to wind energy and its purported effects on humans have attempted to bootstrap themselves into the role of expert witnesses on a variety of subjects that they are not qualified to speak about in civil suits, Environmental Review Tribunals in Canada and Environment, Resources and Development proceedings in Australia. They haven’t fared well. This post details the failures to gain expert status and have evidence admitted of the following non-expert ‘experts’:
As blogger Ketan Joshi has observed, unlike any other disease “wind turbine syndrome” seems to be a health problem that occurs mainly in English-speaking countries.
Eric Gillespie, anti-wind lawyer, received a great amount more of legal fees to fail yet again in this extensive appeal. You would think that the people who keep paying him would eventually realize that they are giving money to a lawyer whose track record is terrible.
The tribunal found the current state of scientific opinion was that there was no causal link of a physiological nature between adverse health effects and wind turbines. It was given no evidence at all that would justify the tribunal adopting a view that was opposed to the clearly stated opinions of the health authorities.
What links the phenomena of allegedly stressed emus, dancing cattle and disoriented echidnas? Nothing but the ill-founded trend to blame anything and everything on wind farms
The most interesting places on Earth are the subduction zones where tectonic plates of science and emotion scrape relentlessly. Buried in these dynamic boundaries we find the most telling insights into human nature. Wind energy spans the continents of science and sentiment, and discourse is dominated by this violent collision of empirical reality and unbridled passion.
