Federal regulators cited a North Dakota company for a serious safety violation in connection with the death of a 40-year-old crane operator at a wind farm near Elgin, Nebraska.
Wind Noise, Health, & Safety
As I’ve expected for some time, there’s a new effort to create and propagate health fears around solar power, given the rapid decrease in costs, and the rising threat it poses to incumbent generators like coal and gas. It’s going to take precisely the same shape as the campaign around wind farms, and unless we think deeply about the necessary ingredients for this type of techno-panic to flourish, it’s going to last just as long, and cause just as much harm.
There are reasons normally-rational people will angrily reject good science, and credulously believe bad science. We twist ourselves into awkward, dissonant ideological formations, and it seems people who wield the most power are most likely to engage in this proud rejection of reality.
Results: (1) Infrasound sound near wind turbines does not exceed audibility thresholds. (2) Epidemiological studies have shown associations between living near wind turbines and annoyance. (3) Infrasound and low-frequency sound do not present unique health risks. (4) Annoyance seems more strongly related to individual characteristics than noise from turbines. (Public Domain)
Gretchen Tenbusch, health officer for Huron and Tuscola counties’ health departments, said she had looked at five death certificates of individuals supposedly dying from wind turbines. Her review found that three of the people were “not even in a wind farm”; one had a heart attack and wind turbines couldn’t be linked to cause of death; and turbines could not have been blamed for the fourth person’s death.
From a scientific standpoint, wind farm syndrome fails the test of cause and effect, which generally has to fulfil two criteria: that harm from infrasound makes biological sense; and that there is a dosage effect. What’s reliably known about the effects of infrasound on the body cannot account for how these effects might cause the symptoms.
“Makes you wonder what all the fuss is about, really,” he says.
Results suggest accessing positively framed health information may reverse or dilute the effect of negative expectations formed from exposure to media warnings about health risks posed by new technologies, such as wind turbines.
The most likely cause of nocebic symptoms is the misattribution of normal and common physical sensations to infrasound. This further heightens monitoring for such sensations, creating a vicious cycle of somatisation. Illuminatingly, people less symptoms if they cannot see a wind turbine from their property compared to people who can, even if they live closer to one [8], presumably because they lack the constant visual reminder to screen themselves for symptoms and attribute them accordingly.
How do we practically achieve that? There are two key elements to refuting misinformation. The first half of a debunking is offering a factual alternative. To understand what I mean by this, you need to understand what happens in a person’s mind when you correct a misconception.
