In this chapter, we will take a critical look at some of the windfarm opponents’ favourite research papers that are regularly highlighted in their advocacy. We will look at what judges and tribunal bodies have said about some of the expert witnesses that these groups have used or tried to use to support their cases. We will then summarise the very latest independent reviews of the evidence, highlighting the 2015 Australian National Health and Medical Research Council’s systematic review,1 as well as the single most important study in this field: a longitudinal study of the health of people living near windfarms in two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Prince Edward Island. This study was conspicuously ignored by the authors of the majority report of the 2015 Australian Senate Committee on Wind Turbines.2

Early data on annoyance

Opponents try to walk on both sides of the street with this argument, as their megaphoning of a report about a very early turbine in the USA illustrates. In 2013, anti-windfarm networks got very excited when they unearthed a 1985 report that had been presented at a 1987 US conference by Neil Kelley, a staff member of the Solar Energy Resarch Institute.3 Kelley’s work was stimulated by complaints made by ‘about a dozen families’ living within a three-kilometre radius of a single wind turbine near the town of Boone in North Carolina. These families represented ‘a very small fraction of over 1000 families’ living within the same radius.

The investigations found that very low frequency noise (including infrasound) generated by the turbine was the cause of the ‘annoyance’ reported by these families. This annoyance included ‘sensations’, ‘a sense of uneasiness’, and ‘booming or thumping pulsations’. These sensations were experienced worst in bedrooms. The authors concluded that the low frequency noise was amplified by the complainants’ homes. The field work took place between 1979 and 1981. The turbine being tested was a downwind turbine of a type that no longer exists today. One of the reasons they no longer exist today is that the downwind design had noise issues that did not occur with upwind designs.

Indeed, this was confirmed in another report on an upwind turbine (MOD-2) by Kelley in 1988, in which he concluded:

Predictably, while lionising Kelley’s findings on the now long-redundant turbine, windfarm opponents have been utterly silent on his ‘unhelpful’ findings about the upwind turbine.

If a report on the noise or emissions levels of cars built in the late 1970s was presented today as evidence about the noise or emission footprints of modern vehicles, people would understandably laugh because of the huge progress that has been made with emission controls in the last 40 years. But this has not stopped anti-windfarm groups from doing just that when it comes to wind turbines. Russell Marsh, then director of the Clean Energy Council, commented appositely that the relevance of this old study today was ‘the equivalent of taking a study about Ataris [game consoles] and applying it to the latest iPads.’5

This didn’t stop the 2015 Senate inquiry, chaired by Madigan, from describing Kelley’s research as ‘ground-breaking’.6 This is just one example of the questionable research promoted by windfarm opponents. Next, we will consider some of their other favourites.   

​Alec Salt’s work on rodent cochlea outer hair cells

Alec Salt, PhD is an inner-ear-fluid physiologist and professor in the Department of Otolaryngology at Washington University in Saint Louis. He maintains a web page about his research into the effects of infrasound, particularly as he believes it applies to infrasound emanating from windfarms.7 He is listed as a scientific advisor to the Society for Wind Vigilance,8 a group comprising a who’s who of individuals who are openly hostile to windfarms. His work is almost invariably referenced in submissions to governments by windfarm opponents who want to point to physiological evidence for their assertions. He has also made numerous submissions himself.

Salt has published research on what happens to the ears of laboratory guinea pigs and chinchillas when they are exposed to experimentally generated infrasound.9 His and others’ work has demonstrated that in guinea pigs the outer hair cells of the cochlea are stimulated by low-frequency sounds at levels much lower than are the inner cochlea hair cells. On the basis of this work Salt has speculated about whether infrasound from wind turbines might cause some of the symptoms typically associated with ‘wind turbine syndrome’. While on his web page his language is less circumspect (‘Wind turbines can be hazardous to human health’ – our emphasis), in his scientific writing Salt is guarded on this possibility, writing (our emphasis):

Note here that Salt and his co-author take care to stress that their speculations refer to long-term stimulation by wind turbines. In the previous chapter, we reviewed claims by opponents that exposure to wind turbine infrasound could cause disturbances within minutes of exposure. It is notable that Salt has not himself published original research on humans exposed to wind turbine infrasound and low frequency noise.

Swedish acoustical researchers have dismissed Salt’s speculations:

Nissenbaum, Hanning and Aramini’s sleep disturbance study

Michael Nissenbaum and Christopher Hanning are board members and Jeff Aramini is a scientific advisor with the anti-windfarm Society for Wind Vigilance.12 In 2012 they published a study in which they compared validated sleep questionnaires from cross-sectional samples of 38 people who lived between 375 and 1400 metres away from an Ontario windfarm with those of 41 people who lived between 3.3 and 6.6 kilometres from turbines.13 Their abstract declares that those living nearer the turbines:

This finding is frequently highlighted by windfarm opponents. The study was savaged in two letters later published in the same journal, where it was pointed out that the authors did not report any actual sound data in their paper, but instead used post hoc ‘visually obtained’ data.14 This was said to be ‘not scientifically defensible’ and an astonishing omission, given the centrality of the sound data to their claims about the dose-response relationships of distance (as a proxy for sound) and sleep and mental health outcomes. The critics also noted that ‘The authors did not provide the r^₂ values [the core sleep outcome results] for any of the three figures nor did they present the slope equations for these lines.’ They also noted that with the ESS scale the study used to rate sleep, a score of 10 or more is considered sleepy and a score of 18 or more is considered very sleepy. In the study, those living near turbines had significantly different ESS sleep scores than those in the far group (7.8 vs. 5.7)

But these scores do not indicate any serious sleep problems. The percentage with ESS scores greater than 10 was not statistically different between the two groups. They also noted that between 10 and 20 percent of the general population report having ESS scores greater than ten.

Despite their involvement with the oppositional Society for Wind Vigilance, the three authors made no declaration of competing interests and even thanked two other society members, Rick James and Carl Phillips (see later in this chapter), for their advice on the manuscript.

Daniel Shepherd and the Makara Valley sleep study

Daniel Shepherd is a psycho-acoustician from Auckland University of Technology. He has published several studies and commentaries about wind turbines. In one critical commentary15 on a Polish study,16 he writes of the omission of a relevant competing interest statement from the paper: ‘The fact that this relationship was not disclosed in the section dedicated to “Conflicts of Interest” is indeed the most astonishing omission of all.’ Yet Shepherd then fails to disclose his own role as a listed scientific advisor to the Society for Wind Vigilance.17

Another, in the non-indexed Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society (see later in this chapter), is an opinion piece about his views on the siting of wind turbines near communities.18 A third is a study, frequently cited by windfarm opponents, which they claim presents important evidence about the effects on sleep quality of residents living around a New Zealand windfarm at Makara, some ten kilometres to the west of Wellington.19 The trouble is, it doesn’t.

The study was cross-sectional and used a control group consisting of people who lived at least eight kilometres away from the Makara windfarm. It used what is called ‘non-equivalent group design’, where intact (i.e. pre-existing) groups are compared, which lacks the advantage of random selection: although the research may rest on an assumption that the groups are comparable, they may differ from one another in some significant way. In this case, the sample of people living close to the windfarm was drawn from 56 houses, while the control group was drawn from 250 houses. The researchers did not identify how many participants per household were recruited, but the final sample was made up of only 39 people in the windfarm exposed group and 158 in the control group. The study therefore seems very underpowered.

Shepherd’s researchers asked participants to respond to two questions relating to amenity: (a) ‘I am satisfied with my neighbourhood/living environment’; and (b) ‘my neighbourhood/living environment makes it difficult for me to relax at home’. They reported that, compared to those living in a turbine-free area, members of the Makara sample were less satisfied with their living environment and reported that they found it more difficult to relax at home. There were no differences between the groups in terms of self-rated health and current illness. The Makara sample reported lower sleep satisfaction than the comparison group, and the researchers posited that ‘the high incidence of annoyance from turbine noise in the turbine group is consistent with the theory that exposure to wind turbine noise is the cause of these differences’.

In addressing this claim, it is important to understand the practical implications of recent findings that it is noise annoyance that mediates the relationship between exposure to windfarm sound and sleep disturbance.20 There is a relationship between noise annoyance and concern about the health consequences of noise exposure.21 In short, people annoyed by noise are more likely to evaluate the effects of noise negatively and to have concerns about noise related health issues, such as the possibility of sleep disturbance. As we discuss in depth in Chapter 5, when people are concerned about the health effects of an environmental agent they are inclined to monitor their physiological state and attribute their ordinary experience of symptoms to that environmental agent.22 Thus people concerned about noise-induced sleep disturbance may begin to monitor their sleep patterns and erroneously attribute any disturbance to noise emitted by wind turbines. Epidemiological studies consistently indicate that sleep disturbance and fatigue are commonly experienced in the community.23 For instance, evidence has shown 27 percent of New Zealand adults aged 20 to 59 years have a current sleep problem.24 Beyond a priming effect, where ordinary sleep disturbance is misattributed to windfarms, concern may itself interfere with sleep patterns, given the relationship between anxiety and sleep difficulties, such as insomnia.25

Further, concern itself can have an effect on objective and subjective sleep quality. In a double-blind experimental field study in Germany, participants were exposed to sham signals and electromagnetic field signals from an experimental base station while their sleep was monitored in their home environment over 12 nights.26 There was no evidence that the electromagnetic fields emitted by mobile phone base stations had any direct short-term physiological effects on sleep quality. However, the results indicated a negative impact on objective and subjective sleep quality in subjects who were concerned that their proximity to the base stations might negatively affect their health.

This study has particular relevance for Shepherd’s study, as at the time his survey was distributed there had been some negative publicity about the Makara windfarm. For instance, on 4 August 2009 a small number of people experiencing apprehension about the windfarm, such as concerns about sleep disturbance, publicly discussed their concerns on a free-to-air national television program. Media reporting about the adverse impact of environmental factors has been shown to create or exacerbate concern within ostensibly affected communities, even when these concerns are unwarranted.27 Further, an opposition group, the Makara Guardians, was formed in 1997 and claimed to represent the views of 85 percent of the small community. Its agitation against the windfarm for over ten years would have fomented and consolidated health concerns in the district.28  Thus, there are a number of reasons why people may attribute sleep disturbance to windfarm noise, without there being a direct relationship between noise exposure and sleep disturbance. It is also very important to be aware that objective and subjective measures of sleep disturbance are only modestly correlated.29 Therefore subjective measures of sleep disturbance measured in windfarm studies may not reflect actual sleep disturbance. In fact, in Chapter 5, we explore a study comparing objective and subjective measures of sleep disturbance in people living near a new windfarm development in Ontario, Canada.30 Subjective data, gathered using sleep diaries, showed a deterioration in reported sleep quality after the windfarm began operating. However objective data, collected using polysomnography, revealed the issue was one of perception. In reality there had been no significant change in sleep parameters following exposure to wind-turbine sound. It is also relevant that Shepherd’s 2010 survey was distributed relatively soon after the windfarm began operating in April 2009. For those living in proximity to windfarms, positive attitudes to windfarms have been shown to increase over time.31 Given the windfarm was a relatively new feature of the landscape, and that there had been adverse publicity about the effects of the windfarm on the living environment, it is unsurprising that, overall, the 39 people who responded to the survey were less satisfied with their living environment than the control group. Importantly, by 2012, complaints about Makara windfarm were fading.32

Finally, Shepherd was quoted in 2013 – some two years after publishing his study – as saying that ‘he knew of no one in New Zealand who had suffered health problems from wind turbine infrasound’ and that ‘the issue was hotly contested in the scientific community’. He observed that ‘The debate was not “black and white” and scientists needed to research whether infrasound was caused by the “voodoo effect” of bad publicity or the hum.’33

Iranian windfarm worker’s sleep problems

Graham Lloyd at the Australian regularly reports on claims about windfarms in a manner that delights windfarm opponents. The febrile anti-windfarm website Stop These Things cannot get enough of his work:

In May 2015 Lloyd reported on a study by researchers from Tehran University.35 The study purported to show that maintenance employees who worked closest to an Iranian windfarm’s turbines had poorer sleep patterns than those working in security and administration, further away from the turbines. Lloyd highlighted a quote from the study’s abstract in two of his reports: ‘despite all the good benefits of wind turbines, it can be stated that this technology has health risks for all those exposed to its sound.’36 All those exposed. Not just some, please note. Ketan Joshi, an experienced analyst of renewable energy policy, took apart this study on his blog on the same day Lloyd’s report was published.37 He noted that the Iranian paper’s very opening raised immediate suspicions that we were dealing with a less than well informed group of authors when they stated: ‘Noise from wind turbines is one of the most important factors affecting the health, welfare, and human sleep’. As Joshi replied: ‘No it isn’t. Transportation noise is, by and large, the major cause of sleep loss’. There is no report anywhere that places windfarms as ‘one of the most important factors’.

The authors used the Epworth sleepiness scale to measure the impacts of windfarm exposure on sleep in 54 employees of a windfarm.38 Joshi noted that the study lacked a control group, instead comparing three groups of windfarm employees: mechanics, security personnel and officials, who, the authors noted, worked at different distances from the turbines. Bizarrely, the authors did not say how many people were in each group or provide any data on how far away the security and officials worked from the turbines (for example, did the officials work in a town or city, or in an office near the farm?). There was no plainly highly relevant information about whether the participants had any history of sleep problems or other risk factors for such problems. Even more bizarrely, Joshi noted, the authors also wrote of the Epworth scale that:

 Joshi concluded:

And what about Australian windfarm employees? In 2013–14, there were 1720 people employed in the wind industry.39 In a report in Victoria’s Hamilton Spectator newspaper on 13 April 2013, AGL’s wind energy operations manager Brendan Ryan said that absenteeism due to ill health had been very low. ‘Site morale is high and engaged, with total hours worked since June 2012 being 36,171 hours. Sick hours during this period is 136 hours – which is less than half of one percent’.40

Japanese brains ‘cannot achieve a relaxed state’ after wind turbine exposure

Graham Lloyd’s May 2015 report in the Australian also referred to an experimental Japanese study published in an Iranian journal where 15 test subjects were exposed to several sound stimuli, including the recorded aerodynamic noise from a wind turbine and a synthetic periodical sound.41 The subjects were examined with an electroencephalogram and the authors reported that ‘the test subjects cannot keep relaxed and their concentration after hearing the sound stimulus at the frequency band of 20 Hz.’ Geoff Leventhall, a vastly experienced acoustician who has often appeared as an expert witness in windfarm court cases, told me that in this study:

Ketan Joshi’s take on this study?

Similar to Leventhal, Joshi compared such levels to the noise that would be experienced right inside a wind turbine nacelle, not hundreds of metres or several kilometres away, and notes that windfarm workers would never work inside turbine nacelles when the turbines were turning. Lloyd’s report, meanwhile, seemed oblivious to the totally unrealistic sound levels used in the study. One wag I follow on a blog quipped, regarding this study, that given Denmark has the greatest concentration of wind turbines in the world, ‘How do Danes survive without being consistently excited by their turbines?’

​Brains are again ‘excited’ by infrasound

In July 2015, the indefatigable Lloyd was at it again, with a front-page story.42 This time it was yet another ‘ground-breaking’ study which was ‘challenging wind energy proponents’ insistence that turbines are not linked to health complaints reported by those living close by’. According to Lloyd, a German research group had concluded ominously:

In fact the study, presented at a conference, was not about wind turbines at all, but about infrasound generally.43 But Lloyd was spot on in his prediction: I was anything but persuaded, because as we shall now see, this study was also much ado about nothing. We have already considered Kelley et al.’s NASA/Solar Research Institute study (see Chapter 3), and the Japanese and Iranian studies above. So let us look at what excited Lloyd and windfarm opponents this time.

In the study, subjects were exposed to infrasound and then asked to describe their experience. Their brain responses were measured using magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. This demonstrated that sounds of 8 Hz could be measured in the brain, a whole octave lower than had been previously assumed, and that excita­tion of the primary auditory cortex could be detected down to this frequency.44 All participants said that they had heard something. But these findings were hardly ‘ground-breaking’. Earlier work found evidence of very similar auditory cortex stimulation from noise at 12 Hz, only slightly higher than the 8 Hz in this study.45 The Australian’s subeditors ran the headline ‘Brains excited by wind turbines study’, but it wasn’t a wind turbine study at all, and auditory cortex stimulation at 8 Hz (at pressure levels around the threshold of hearing) is meaningless in the context of wind turbine-generated infrasound, which is well below the threshold of perception.

Moreover, even fake stimuli can precipitate measurable activity in the brain. We know that both placebos and nocebos can increase changes in cerebral metabolic rate when viewed via positron emission tomography (PET) scanning.46 Expectations do not just affect people’s subjective experience of a stimulus (such as exposure to infrasound) but can actually produce measurable changes in brain activity which may or may not be markers of anything clinically significant. Fascinating work from Hungary47 and Germany48 on ‘electrosensitive’ people (for example, those claiming to be made ill by exposure to mobile phones, wi-fi or other ‘stray’ electricity) has shown that when such individuals are exposed to sham radiation from their feared source while thinking it is real, they experience symptoms. Correlates of these symptoms can be measured in the brain. The Hungarian study exposed both people with ‘Idiopathic Environmental Intolerance (IEI) attributed to electromagnetic fields’ and control subjects not reporting this condition to sham radiation.49 Those claiming IEI to electromagnetic frequency radiation both expected and experienced more symptoms. In the German study, subjectively electrosensitive patients and gender-matched healthy controls were also exposed to sham mobile phone radiation and heat as a control condition. The subjects were not aware that the radiation was fake.50 Both before and during these exposures, increased activations in anterior cingulate and insular cortex as well as fusiform gyrus were seen in the electrosensitive group compared to controls, while heat stimulation led to similar activations in both groups.

As the Hungarian researchers noted, electrosensitivity:

In short, as the old saying goes, you can worry yourself sick. And those who spread fear and worry are arguably an important part of this process.

Lloyd left messages for me to comment on the German research for his story. His report noted that I did not respond. I had zero interest in obligingly playing into what has long been a campaign by the Australian to discredit wind energy. The Australian has reported on a succession of ‘studies’ ranging from trivial to terrible, and has published opinion pieces which are exalted by the tiny cells of anti-windfarm activists who are happy to embrace any fragment that furthers their cause.

No reporter from News Corporation has ever reported on any of our now ten papers published in peer-reviewed journals on wind turbines (listed at the end of this book). The News Corporation agenda on wind energy is a travesty of good journalism.

​Steven Cooper’s windfarm ‘signature’ study

Steven Cooper is an Australian acoustician whose work is lauded by windfarm opponents. In 2013 he was engaged by the windfarm operator Pacific Hydro (PacHydro) to conduct a study involving residents who had been complaining about noise and vibration from the Cape Bridgewater windfarm in Victoria. Cooper was the acoustician requested by the complainants to conduct the study during 2014, and which was publicly released jointly by Pacific Hydro and Cooper’s company on 21 January 2015. Interestingly, one study participant’s report of her experiences in the project notes that the project was ‘supported directly by Senator Madigan and staff’, while another says that the study was ‘facilitated by Senator John Madigan’.51 Madigan is a virulent opponent of windfarms.

Cooper recorded noise data at a total of three houses and the diary entries of six residents living in these houses, situated 650 to 1600 metres from the nearest turbine at the Cape Bridgewater windfarm. Acoustic monitoring of noise and vibration was undertaken, data were provided to Cooper by Pacific Hydro on when the turbines were operating or shut down, and the residents were asked to maintain diaries over eight weeks, noting and rating what Cooper calls ‘sensations’ they experienced. These included ‘headache, pressure in the head, ears or chest, ringing in the ears, heart racing, or a sensation of heaviness’. These sensations were rated by the residents from one to five, with five being the most severe.

Completing the diaries would have imposed an onerous task on the six residents, who ‘as far as possible … were asked to provide diary entries on a one to two hourly basis’, excluding sleep periods.

In his introduction to the study, Cooper states:

Changes in operating power of course occur when wind conditions change. Turbines visibly slow when the wind dies down and speed up when it lifts. When three families with histories of protesting virulently against the local windfarm are asked to make diary entries for an acoustician whom they requested to conduct the study, it is reasonable to ask whether they may have been cued by these changes in the wind to make their diary entries.

The report does not name the occupants of the three households that took part in the study. However, they were all complainants. Three households that have very publicly objected to the Cape Bridgewater windfarm have been those of Brian and Joanne Kermond,53 Melissa Ware and Rikki Nicholson,54 and Sonia Trist55 and her son Crispin.56 All three households have co-operated in the publication of video interviews by the coy, nameless operators of Stop These Things.57 Sonia Trist was named as a study participant in the Australian,58 and Melissa Ware confirmed that she was a participant in her submission to the 2015 Senate committee.59 Brian Kermond told the 2015 Senate committee that

Cooper’s report states that ‘One of the houses [number 87 in the report] is abandoned with the occupants advising they reside elsewhere.’ In Appendix A to the report, there are several interior photographs of house 87.61 Interestingly in the context of claims about home ‘abandonment’ (see Chapter 3), the house appears to be fully furnished with kitchen equipment, dining tables, decorations and beds. Appendix M of the report details how the owners returned to the house during the daytime during the study to make their diary entries.62

Cooper has long argued that wind turbine infrasound has a unique ‘signature’ that differentiates it from other sources of infrasound, including that generated by wind itself. This idea has enormous appeal to windfarm opponents, as it could potentially allow an argument that infrasound generated by wind turbines, even at sub-audible volumes, unlike infrasound from wind, surf, cars and so on, has unique, exceptional qualities that cause distress and perhaps health problems to those exposed. Cooper emphasises in his report that he has given this breakthrough a name, resplendent with its very own capital letters.63A major conclusion from his report was that his study had ‘confirmed the results of previous investigations. It demonstrated that there is a unique signature attributed to windfarms … This unique infrasound pattern has been labelled by the author in other investigations as the “Wind Turbine Signature”.’

But in bad news for windfarm victims like Ann Gardner and acoustician Les Huson (see Chapter 6) who believe that wind turbines emit noxious infrasound even when turned off (because of the wind whipping off them when the turbines are stationary), Cooper asserts that the bothersome ‘signature’ only strikes up when the turbines are turning:

Cooper’s report received extensive publicity, not only in Graham Lloyd’s front-page write-up in the Australian. The report and the publicity it received quickly became the focus of a commentary in The Conversation,65 a detailed evisceration by Ketan Joshi66 (who was by now a content specialist at the Australian Renewable Energy Agency), a highly critical review by the Association of Australian Acoustical Consultants,67 and a very public examination by ABC TV’s Media Watch program.68 On 16 February 2015, about a month after the report’s release, Cooper and PacHydro took the unusual step of issuing a public statement in which they stated unequivocally that:

This statement sits interestingly alongside others made by Cooper and those who have lauded his report.

In his submission to the 2015 Senate inquiry, Cooper appended a series of effusive letters written by acousticians and others. When he appeared before the Senate committee, Senator Ann Urquhart asked Cooper to answer several questions on notice about his report (Senator Urquhart eventually submitted a dissenting report70 that differed dramatically from the majority report). The transcript of these exchanges stretches to 30 pages, with Cooper several times showing his irritation. Some of these interactions are extremely notable.

She also asked:

The Association of Australian Acoustical Consultants went to the same point in their Senate submission: ‘The hypothesis is based on a very limited subset of the data, with any data excluded from the analysis if it did not fit the theory. When all data are considered, the evidence does not support the hypothesis.’ 71

Cooper confirmed that only ‘severity 5’ data were considered because these were defined as being at the ‘worst case scenario’ level of severity and so of particular interest. Of the excluded data, he said, ‘Whereas some compliance test reports hide or dismiss the failed or removed data, page 115 of the report identified the sensation severity 5 data that was excluded from the analysis.’

This response from Cooper was manifestly inadequate. Urquhart’s supplementary question was about recorded noise data that were missing for 50 of the 81 (61.7 percent) occasions when ‘severity 5’ diary entries were entered by the study participants. So here, a large majority of the data were missing or unusable, rending the remaining 38.3 percent of usable data pairings possibly confounded by unknown variables. Missing values are very common in research and different statistical techniques are available to address missing values. Without conducting a missing values bias analysis on a data set with such a large proportion of data missing, there is no way of knowing whether important biases might have influenced the computations.

Urquhart also asked: ‘Are you aware how many times a wind turbine signature in your hypothesis occurred and the residents reported no sensations?’ Cooper replied with heavy sarcasm, arguing that he could not comment on such occasions because the subjects obviously did not record sensations at such times: missing (unrecorded) diary entries were just that – missing. But this was of course, the whole point of Urquhart’s question. Cooper appeared not to understand that Urquhart’s question was an invitation for him to look at his wind turbine ‘signature’ data and predict from it when the severe sensations should have occurred (and been reported) if indeed his hypothesis that the ‘signature’ infrasound moments were associated with intolerable sensations in the residents was correct. In other words, Urquhart’s question went to the core issue of whether the hypothesised infrasound ‘signature’ had any predictive value for the sensations that these residents had long complained about.

Cooper’s omission of this key issue underscores the statement in the joint release that the report was ‘not scientific’. It is highly unscientific to note only the occasions when the data show an association, but not to consider that with such vast missing data, there may have been many other occasions when the residents felt sensations.

Urquhart also asked:

Although Cooper had jointly issued a statement with Pacific Hydro that his study was ‘not scientific’, he did not hesitate to concur that his work had established the ‘fact’ that his study had established a ‘cause-and-effect’ relationship.

Beyond the small echo chamber of his supporters, the reception to Cooper’s work has been sceptical. Acoustician Geoff Leventhall delivered a paper to the 7th International Conference on Wind Farm Noise in Rotterdam in May 2017 in which he strongly criticised Cooper’s study:

Two authors from the Australian National University wrote in The Conversation:

They described some of the key methodological problems in Cooper’s report, such as the small sample size, lack of any control group, major study population bias, and motivated reasoning. Moreover, they observed that the total report is remarkable for the complete absence of any form of statistical testing of the associations it posits between the independent variables of noise-recording data and the dependent (or outcome) data of ‘sensations’ noted in the diaries of the six individuals in the three houses. I concurred with their analysis and in the comments section wrote:

In March 2015, Cooper told the television program Today Tonight that he had commenced legal action against me over two public criticisms I had made of his study (see Chapter 7).

​The Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society

In October 2010, the openly oppositional Society for Wind Vigilance held a conference titled ‘First International Symposium: The Global Wind Industry and Adverse Health Effects: Loss of Social Justice?’ in Picton, Ontario. In September 2011, eight papers from the meeting were published in a special edition of a journal you could be excused from never having encountered. The Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society has appeared erratically. It was indexed between 1981 and 1995 by the Web of Science, the international scientific indexing platform which as of September 2014 covered some 12,000 journals worldwide and over 160,000 conference proceedings. But after 1995 it was dropped from the list of journals being indexed by the Web of Science, generally a sign that an indexing service regards a journal as having fallen below an acceptable scientific standard.

A citation search I conducted on 10 October 2011 showed that in the 14 years it was indexed, the journal published 961 papers that had been cited a grand total of 345 times – or an average of 0.36 times per paper. An advanced PubMed search I conducted on 27 February 2017 for any papers published in the journal found just five listed: one from 1992, and four from between 2012 and 2016. PubMed is the indexing service of the US National Library of Medicine. In summary, this journal is not simply a low-ranking scientific publication. At the time of writing, it is more accurately described as an ‘unranking’ journal. Nonetheless, anti-windfarm websites have jubilantly described it as a ‘leading scientific peer-reviewed journal’ and the issue as ‘ground-breaking’.

Among the eight papers in the collection was one by Carmen Krogh, a retired pharmacist and inveterate opponent of windfarms.74 In this paper, Krogh explains that she ‘began investigating reports of adverse health effects made by individuals living in the environs’ of wind turbines in Ontario, Canada ‘more than two years’ ago. That’s it. And this is called peer-reviewed ‘research’. The paper contains no explanation of its methods, so it fails to conform to the most basic requirement of scientific reporting: that it contain details of how the research reported was undertaken. This is a fundamental requirement because without it, readers have no way of assessing the adequacy and rigour of any investigation, and whether any results reported and conclusions drawn are justified or not.

Instead of describing her research methods, Krogh mixes up statements apparently made to her by de-identified informants about the negative effects of exposure to turbines with similar examples from other parts of the world, from websites and submission to inquiries by windfarm opponents. We are told nothing about the process by which her informants were interviewed, the questions they were asked, how they were selected, or whether her ‘study’ was approved by any institutional research ethics committee. This paper would not make first base as a serious scientific investigation. Its findings contain not a single example of an informant reporting anything but adverse effects of exposure to windfarms, when it is widely acknowledged that a large majority of those so exposed neither report adverse effects nor complain about the turbines – and that many even like them!

In an attempt to understand the peer-review process that had been followed, in August 2011 I wrote to the editor of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, asking the following questions:

1. Were you approached by those participating in [a 2010 anti-windfarm meeting held in Ontario] to publish these papers? Or did the initiative come from you?
2. Did you personally edit this issue or were guest editors used? If so, can you please describe how they were selected?
3. Was there a charge made to the authors to publish their papers together like this?
4. It is plain that all the papers are openly negative about windfarms, which is curious given that there is a large body of research that demonstrates a very different picture. Did you put out a call for submissions or approach researchers working in this area to submit manuscripts?
5. Did you approach any authors who did not have affiliations with the anti-windfarm movement?
6. Were all the papers peer reviewed?
7. Did the authors propose their own reviewers and were these the reviewers used?
8. Can signed or de-identified copies of these reviews be made available to others on request?

Over several testy email replies, the editor made the following comments:

No copies of reviews or reviewers’ names were provided. A researcher from the University of Adelaide subsequently wrote directly to the authors and received no reviews back. The principle of open peer reviewing is widely discussed in research publishing and while requests by others to see reviews are unusual, refusal to be transparent can only promote suspicion about the process, particularly when the quality of the papers is considered.

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is a former academic who left his last university job in 2009 following criticism of his association with a tobacco company.75 He is listed as a scientific advisor to the Society for Wind Vigilance, which in April 2017 was still referring to him as ‘professor’ despite his having no university affiliation.76 Phillips gave a presentation titled The Absence of Health Studies Proves Nothing at the 2010 conference organised by the Society for Wind Vigilance, and then developed this into a prolix argument for the importance of accepting individuals’ accounts of how wind turbines have caused their various health problems in the special issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society discussed above.77

In that paper, which contains just eight references to windfarms, Phillips states without blinking that there is ‘overwhelming evidence that wind farms cause serious health problems’. His basis for this is the number of ‘adverse event reports’ collected by groups with an interest in the issue. Here he names the self-published ‘scholarly book’ by Pierpont with its 38 cases, the unpublished ‘study’ by Harry with 39 (see Chapter 3 regarding both of these), and another paper that describes 109 cases,78 a total of 186 cases. Amazingly, from this he continues:

So in a single sentence we are asked to deduce from the existence of 186 cases that it is ‘quite conceivable’ that there are between 10,000 and 99,999 cases of adverse events caused by wind turbines. And where is this mass carnage occurring? We are not told. Instead of referencing case reports published in clinical journals (admittedly difficult to do, because there aren’t any – see Chapter 3), Phillips provides excerpts from three self-published cases that ‘his research group’ found on the internet.

One of these describes a family with a five-year-old who had sleeping problems and a 13-year-old with ‘dramatic behavioural changes’ who was ‘spending too much time in her room’ and became defiant. Such behaviour has of course only rarely been observed in young children or teenagers!79 But because it started happening after a nearby turbine started operating, Phillips suspends the most elementary principles of scientific scepticism, assuring us that we should treat such case reports with the same urgency and seriousness as we would reports from people in a North African city who ‘started sending out messages that government forces are shooting into the crowd’. It’s all that simple.

In late 2013, Phillips testified in an Alberta court related to the Bull Creek Wind Project. The final judgment gave him very short shrift over his slap-dash evidence, stating:

Phillips is not the only windfarm opponent to have attempted unsuccessfully to have his ‘expert’ conclusions accepted by a court. Several opponent groups have sought legal injunctions against planned and operational windfarms.80

In August 2014 Mike Barnard summarised the outcomes of 49 such cases concluded since 1998 from five English-speaking nations (17 from Canada, ten from Australia, nine from the UK, eight from the USA and seven from New Zealand).81 He noted that Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark had also seen legal cases brought by objectors dismissed but that these judgments were not available in English. In all but one case,82 these actions failed in government tribunals or courts. The provinces or states that have seen the most legal actions have been Ontario in Canada (14 cases, all of which failed) and Victoria, Australia (seven cases, all failed). Barnard’s report highlights passages from many of the judgments about witnesses attempting to have their proposed expert status accepted by the courts or tribunals. Sixteen individuals are profiled, with several of these noted by the judiciaries as being members of anti-windfarm groups like the Society for Wind Vigilance. 

Reviewing the evidence

As of April 2015 there had been a remarkable 25 published reviews of the available evidence about windfarms and health,83 with the first appearing in 2003.84 These are reviews of all available studies, not single pieces of research. Taken together, they conclude that wind turbines in some places annoy a minority of those who live in their vicinity, that annoyance can sometimes generate health problems consistent with those associated with stress and anxiety, but that there is no strong evidence of direct health effects from turbine exposure. Moreover, they conclude that pre-existing negative attitudes to windfarms are generally stronger predictors of annoyance than distance from the turbines or recorded levels of noise. In other words, people who don’t like windfarms or who are anxious about them can often be annoyed and worried by them as well. As we will review in Chapter 5, some of these people might even worry themselves sick. 

The 2015 National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Review

More recent reviews are of greater interest than earlier efforts because they are of course able to consider more recent evidence as well as a longer body of research. Of these, that published by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) in 2015 stands out as the most rigorous because of its highly detailed and transparent strict criteria for study inclusion.85 The full methods and levels of evidence included in the report are set out in full in a systematic review that was commissioned by the NHMRC.86

The two most important conclusions of the 2015 NHMRC report were:

In its search for evidence, the authors of the review noted that searches of peer-reviewed and ‘grey’ literature (i.e. that not published in peer-reviewed publications) was conducted and identified 2850 potentially relevant references.87 The NHMRC also provided 506 documents obtained from public submissions or from other sources. However, only 11 articles – reporting on seven cross-sectional studies that investigated associations between wind turbines and health – met pre-specified eligibility criteria. Windfarm opponents predictably rejected the findings. This was always going to be the case, as a 2013 interview with Sarah Laurie indicated:

As a South Australian court judgment stated, Laurie ‘rejects all studies … which are not consistent with her theories’. The NHMRC’s review would have been acceptable to the opponents only if its conclusions were in lockstep with their own.

The review published in 2015 was undertaken in a highly politicised context. A rapid review of the evidence published by the NHMRC in 2010 had intensely annoyed windfarm opponents because, like all other reviews published before and since, it had not reached conclusions that confirmed their claims.89 A small number of federal politicians who were virulently opposed to windfarms saw to it that three Senate inquiries into the issue were held between 2012 and 2015. The Abbott Coalition government desperately needed as many cross-bench senators as possible to support its legislation and so indulged four of these (Madigan, Xenophon, Leyonhjelm and Day) with the third Senate inquiry in 2015.

Following the release of the NHMRC report in early 2015, the head of the NHMRC, Professor Warwick Anderson, told a Senate Estimates Committee hearing that $2.5 million was being allocated from existing NHMRC research funds to further research into wind turbines and health.90 Questioned by Greens Senator Richard Di Natale about why scarce funding was being allocated to the topic when the NHMRC report had found no evidence of a direct effect on health, Anderson explained that the report had shown that the ‘science is not good, there’s not much of it and it’s all poor quality’. The funding was an attempt to fill this gap by producing research of a high standard, he argued.

But Di Natale drew Anderson’s attention to a statement from a senior NHMRC official who had written that the decision to allocate funding to wind turbine and health research reflected the ‘macro-political environment’.91 In other words, the NHMRC’s decision had been politicised: it was responding to the government’s need to soothe the politically powerful crossbench.

Instead of setting up a dedicated research funding pool for windfarm research, Warwick Anderson and the NHMRC should have stated clearly and emphatically that any researcher wanting to investigate windfarms and health was at perfect liberty to submit such a proposal to compete with those being submitted by researchers considering any other topic. Such a proposal would stand or fall on its competitiveness as determined by peer review. There is no dedicated research funding being set aside by the NHMRC to further investigate the known massive risks to human health from fossil-fuel extraction and burning. And it would be unimaginable for the NHMRC to quarantine money for any other non-disease like wi-fi sensitivity, the dangers of smart electricity meters or ‘fan death’, the widespread folk belief in Korea that sleeping near an electric fan can cause death (see Figure 4.1). Yet this is what it did in allocating special funding to research into windfarms.

The money allocated was a very small proportion of the NHMRC’s total budget. But the real damage was that in elevating this issue to privileged research status, the NHMRC greatly encouraged the political apostles of windfarm opposition.

​Health Canada study

In 2014, Health Canada published a summary of results of a much awaited $2.1 million investigation into the health effects of windfarms, in the very sort of direct study that opponents had been demanding.92 The Canadian study data were collected between May and September 2013 from adults aged 18 to 79 (606 males, 632 females), randomly selected from households located between 0.25 and 11.22 kilometres from wind turbines in two Canadian provinces, Ontario and Prince Edward Island.

In March 2015, the Health Canada study group published its full findings in a series of open-access papers in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,93 the world’s most-cited acoustical research journal, and in Sleep,94 a leading journal in sleep research. Following is a summary of some of its chief findings.

Sleep disturbance

The researchers assessed self-reported sleep quality over the preceding 30 days using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, and used a wrist monitor to record the total sleep time and the rate and duration of awakening bouts, for a total of 3772 nights. Averaged over a year, the measured sound of the turbines at the houses reached a maximum of 46 dB(A) with an average of 35.6 dB(A). A volume of 46 dB is about as loud as a dishwasher operating in a kitchen.

The study found that self-reported health effects (migraines, tinnitus, dizziness, etc.), sleep disturbance, sleep disorders, quality of life, and perceived stress were not related to the level of wind turbine noise.95 Similarly, both self-reported and objectively measured sleep outcomes consistently revealed no apparent pattern or statistically significant relationship to wind turbine noise levels.96 Unsurprisingly, sleep was affected by whether residents had other health conditions (including sleep disorders), their caffeine consumption, and whether they were personally annoyed by the blinking lights to alert aircraft on the wind turbines. As we have previously emphasised, sleeping problems affect around 29 percent of people in all communities, regardless of whether they are near windfarms or not.97

Stress

The researchers used a recognised scale to measure self-reported stress (the perceived stress scale, or PSS) as well as recording hair cortisol concentrations, resting blood pressure, and heart rate.98 Wind turbine noise exposure had no apparent influence on any of these. Moreover, the majority (between 77 and 89 percent) of the variance in the PSS scores was unaccounted for by differences in these objective measures. Again, the study concluded that the findings did not support an association between exposure to wind turbines and elevated self-reported or objectively defined measures of stress.

​Do wind turbines annoy people?

Expressions such as being ‘hot and bothered’ are well understood. Being annoyed is not a health problem in itself, but chronic annoyance can have health consequences. The Health Canada study reported:

There is much variation in how people react to noise. A 2014 review of symptoms related to modern technology (including wind turbines) found that those who were more anxious, worried, concerned, or annoyed about a source that they believed to be a health risk more commonly reported symptoms than did those without such beliefs.100

While proximity to the turbines was statistically significantly associated with annoyance, the relationship was weak. It was better explained by factors such as holding negative views about the visual impact of the turbines, being able to the see the blinking aircraft warning lights, the perception of vibrations when the turbines were turning, and holding high concerns about physical safety. These are all variables that bothered some but not most people.101 Less than 10 percent of the participants derived personal benefit (such as income) from the turbines. Deriving personal benefit had a modest but statistically significant relationship to not being annoyed. The study authors concluded: ‘Annoyance was significantly lower among the 110 participants who received personal benefit, which could include rent, payments or other indirect benefits of having wind turbines in the area.’

Yet again, a study shows that the wonderful drug known as money appears to be a very effective prophylactic against this non-disease. The authors suggested that ‘these findings would support initiatives that facilitate direct or indirect personal benefit among participants living within a community in close proximity to wind power projects.’ Strategies such as sharing rental incomes across the community, offering free electricity or home improvements, and paying amenity payments may reduce annoyance (see Chapter 8).

There was arguably no greater display of the naked anti-windfarm agenda of the 2015 Senate committee than the total absence from their majority report of any mention of the Canadian study. While no peer-reviewed papers from the study had been published at the time of the Senate committee, the summary results had been public since 30 October 2014. Labor Senator Urquhart’s minority report noted that many submissions to the inquiry recognised the great contribution of the Health Canada study to the body of knowledge on the potential impacts of windfarms on human health.102 The plainly deliberate decision to ignore the Canadian findings marks the Madigan committee as little more than a show trial run by a small group of politicians who had probably made up their minds about what their proceedings would conclude before they started.

In the next chapter, we will move to explore the central thesis of the book: that those experiencing symptoms which they attribute to the direct impact of nearby wind turbines are often experiencing classic symptoms that are associated with fear and anxiety. We will show how windfarm opponents have set out to foment worry and concern about wind turbines in some communities and how, if ‘wind turbine syndrome’ means anything, it is best seen as a potentially contagious syndrome that can be communicated to people who are likely to be receptive to the disturbing claims being made.