Antinuclear

The findings backed up previous reports in Australia showing “unwarranted fear-mongering might cause greater health impacts than the presence of any actual ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’”.

Sarah Laurie, head of the Waubra Foundation, an offshoot of the anti-wind, astroturfer, the Landscape Guardians, is the source of a great deal of the anti-wind propaganda which is harming people’s health.

To date, Sarah Laurie’s work has been largely constrained to south-eastern Australia, however she has begun to spread her wings. We can expect a related spread of so called ‘Wind Turbine Syndrome’, an illness that Professor Simon Chapman has famously dubbed a ‘communicated disease’. (Due to her active spreading of disinformation, she’s up for the Australian Skeptics’ annual Bent Spoon award for 2013.)…..

Quote 1: Ms Laurie invents a diaspora

‘…people are literally being driven out of their homes because of the acoustic pollution.’

Ms Laurie makes this claim regularly, but when pressed refuses to provide more than one or two examples. One is Noel Dean, who claims that his pocket phone miraculously charges when he is close to wind turbines and that the “frequencies produced by the turbines are the same as those that operate the brain” in a recent Senate submission. There are about 240,000 wind turbines operating worldwide, yet only a handful of similarly dubious examples are cited.

Quote 2: Ms Laurie keeps losing parts of the sound spectrum to blame

‘…most of the noise regulations only actually measure the audible part of the sound spectrum above 200 Hz so the regulations don’t actually measure the sound frequencies we believe are causing the problems.’

Numerous studies have measured the lower frequency sounds Ms Laurie claims are a problem. Most recently, the South Australian Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) published a study that measured down to 0.25 Hz and found that the homes nearest wind farms actually had the least low frequency and infrasound of any building studied.

The EPA also tested for low-frequency noise at homes near wind farms with so called ‘on/off testing’. Inconveniently for Ms Laurie, there was no discernible difference when the turbines were switched on and off. These results are in line with a number of other studies which show that urban dwellers are constantly exposed to much higher levels of low-frequency and infrasound than the levels supposedly causing problems for those near wind farms…..

Quote 3: Ms Laurie misremembers sick building syndrome

BP: We had something called sick building syndrome […] discovered to be misaligned air conditioning systems.

SL: physiologically we believe it is identical, it’s just low frequency noise from another source.

The actual cause of sick building syndrome was poor indoor air quality.

Quote 4: Ms Laurie complains that people see the Waubra Foundation for the fraud it is

‘…we are frequently misrepresented in the media of being anti-wind.’

Since the Waubra Foundation was registered three years ago, it has relentlessly attacked wind energy. Her organisation takes its name from Waubra, an Australian town with a wind farm — yet none of its six directors live within 120 kilometers of the town a fact that outrages the local community, which objects to the town’s name being hijacked for a political and science-free agenda……

Quote 7: Ms Laurie isn’t convinced that global warming is real, and doesn’t believe that wind turbines reduce green house gases

‘There’s certainly some work that’s been done in the Netherlands, the US and in Australia that suggest there is no reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, quite apart from the debate that exists about climate change.’

There isn’t a debate about whether climate change is occurring, that it is serious or whether humanity’s emissions of CO2e are the primary cause.

As for wind farms, the words of the Director of Energy Strategy for the UK’s National Grid makes it clear based on their studies, as do all other credible studies, that each MWh of wind power eliminates 99.9 per cent of the CO2e that would have been produced by fossil fuel generation…..

Quote 9: Ms Laurie’s grasp of the severity of real medical concerns is troublingly non-existent

‘I think there is enough precedents in terms of thalidomide, asbestos, tobacco, there’s plenty of examples where industry has been very reluctant to admit things that it subsequently proved later that they knew all along.’

Professor Chapman’s research has shown that less than 1 in 272 people living near Australian wind farms have ever filed a complaint. Ms Laurie — a former family doctor without research qualifications who has been unregistered and non-practicing longer than she was practicing —  derives her evidence from the anecdotal and non-verifiable self-diagnosis of a tiny number of complainants and draws scientifically and medically implausible (and often untestable) conclusions.

Compare this with the history of thalidomide, asbestos and tobacco. In each one of those cases there was a long history of clear harm, diagnosed by medical doctors, proven in research, demonstrated in court cases and written up in the literature over and over.

The worst that the credible research on wind power shows is that some people find the sounds produced by wind farms annoying……

Quote 11: Ms Laurie mistakes wind farms for fossil fuels when it comes to bird deaths

BP: Every turbine kills an average of 300 birds a year — often rare birds like eagles.

 SL: Look, I think that’s very disturbing and I think the suppression of that, or the historic suspicion of that sort of information and denial is absolutely appalling.

Wind farms average 1-2 bird deaths per turbine per year around the world. Every study, every energy utility and every major birding organization in the world agrees that wind energy is one of the absolute best choices for birds and wildlife in general.…..  Crichton’s research indicates that  Ms Laurie is significantly responsible for the anxiety affecting the very people that she intends to help. Sadly, there are reports of people being affected by wind turbines before they are even constructed. http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/life/health/ms-lauries-windfarm-fearmongering-enough-to-make-you-sick/