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Windfarm Sickness Spreads By Word of Mouth
eldavojohn writes "Just like the many stories surrounding alleged 'Wi-Fi sickness,' research is now showing that windfarm sickness spreads by word of mouth instead of applying universally to windfarms. Areas that had never had any noise or health complaints were suddenly experiencing them after 2009 when anti-wind groups targeted populations surrounding windfarms. From the article, 'Eighteen reviews of the research literature on wind turbines and health published since 2003 had all reached the broad conclusion that there was very little evidence they were directly harmful to health.' While there's unfortunately no way to prove that someone is lying about how they feel, it's likely a mixture of confirmation bias, psychosomatic response, hypochondria, greed and hatred of seeing windmills on the horizon that drives this phenomenon."
People are still just as stupid as they've always been...
I suggest someone spread around the idea that coal power plants endager the health those nearby. A bonus is that this might actually be true.
I wish that, when people are frickin' stupid like this, folks would just roll their eyes at them rather than take them seriously.
People seem to come up with the dumbest reasons they think they're ill. I know it can be frustrating to feel badly and not know why, but come on. Use some science.
Or maybe one has nothing to do with the other.
Windmills good. Fracking good when done right.
Windmill sickness is no different than cell phone sickness or I saw a fracking rig nearby sickness.
Stop trying to score stupid political points.
Having a beautiful, natural view obscured by ugly windmills couldn't possibly cause stress and induce real physical sickness in folks, now could it?!
If you travel much, you'll notice that folks tend to be happier in areas with beautiful scenery, much less so elsewhere.
Another thing, most people tend to be very mild mannered. Quite a large number of people will accept a burnt pizza with a smile, only a small minoroty will complain. Perhaps these people were bothered all along and just didn't say anything to avoid rocking the boat...until it was pointed out to them that they had the right to speak up and demand a pizza that wasn't burnt to a crisp.
Can actually make you sick. Fear, paranoia, stress can all affect the mind to think there's something wrong with the body, until it manifests. That's why attitude is such an important part of recovering from sickness... if you think you're not going to get better, you may not, but it's guaranteed that it will take longer for you to get better as a consequence.
Then again I'd sooner listen a politician than an anti-windmill activist, you've gotta be f'in stupid to think windfarms are bad for your health.
"Windfarm Sickness"? Lame.
"Don Quixote Syndrome"? Much better.
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
That's what you call double standards.
The psychosomatic consequences of windpower are nothing that should stop anybody from building windfarms. But when people in Japan, who have barely been exposed to any significant radiation at all, start complaining about imaginary symptoms of their exposure to radiation (as well as very real symptoms of unchecked overdosing on iodine) this is just yet another reason to do away with nuclear power.
Maybe it could. If it did you'd expect studying the incidence of the supposed symptoms that it causes would show that they had a correlation with the presence of windfarms independent of propaganda campaigns targeting the local area and attempting to convince people that windfarms are bad for health.
Science was created so that we didn't have to answer question be anecdote and supposition.
Does windmill construction require pumping undisclosed "trade secret" chemicals into the ground water?
If by "collective" you mean the collected knowledge built up by logic and experimentation, then yes.
"I feel sick, someone told me it was the windmills so it must be them" despite no medically known process that would cause this with several studies conducted that found no link is not comparable to the fact that pumping chemicals into the ground contaminates the groundwater.
These people do feel sick, I'm sure. The cause isn't the windmills - it's the placebo affect in reverse. Most people don't feel sick until someone tells them the windmills are making them sick. The ones who felt sick before are from some other cause, there is exactly the same amount of evidence that the sickness could be caused by houses, roads, or mailboxes as there is that it's caused by windmills, that is to say, none. They felt sick, and point to a random object and blame it. Not rational or logical, but a lot of people do it.
In a fashion so does the flu... All mouths should be permanently sealed shut.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The cell phone guys already know this - people report symptoms even when the tower isn't powered on.
It's probably Carbon Monoxide and Soot withdrawal that is causing these wind farm health episodes.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
So in an Village the T-Mobile sets up a tower. Suddenly people started complaining and pointed at the tower for the reason. The Telekom guys were baffled, imagining what would happen if they actually powered it up.
Not quite 'sickness', but my aunt lives on the side of a large hill overlooking a pretty valley... Her balcony used to be a nice place to sit and relax. Now her down-hill neighbor (approximately 2km away) has a wind turbine in his yard and the low frequency periodic noise from it has transformed her balcony into an annoying place to be and she can no longer sleep with the windows open. She's not claiming sickness, she's merely claiming annoyance..
In Ontario, the right-wing establishment have successfully united the usual anti-government, anti-progress suspects with some pissed-off farmers, rural retirees, and rich NIMBYs to create a particularly nasty strain of anti-windmill sentiment. They've become the Typhoid Mary of wind farm sickness.
It's true that the Ont. government was a bit overzealous in a few of its land acquisition, and there were a small number of households which were closer than what is considered a comfortable distance from some installations, but as far as i know, every such household has either been paid off or relocated.
The claimed negative health effects are spurious. I wonder what any of the hundreds of thousands of households located close to rail lines, expressways or airports must think when they hear people whinging about effects from wind generators...
Yes windmills kill some birds and bats. In North America the reported bird-kill from windfarms is a fraction of the kill from oil and gas operations.... and several orders of magnitude lower than the number of birds killed annually by.... house-cats. Like birds? Don't let your stupid cat out.
Finally, the technology is still pretty young. There's every reason to expect that wind generators will become more reliable, efficient, quieter, and that their energy can be stored and used more effectively. How many centuries has coal-burning taken to get efficient and clean up a bit?
The wind is evil and must be stopped!!
Actually windfarms do that a little. There must be some measurable effect as the turbines extract energy from the wind, rendering it to lower energy. SO the way to stop wind is to build more windfarms.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I thought that RLS had been banned in the US? Clinical trials showed that it had potentially dangerous side effects, such as questioning authority.
If this were correct then we would see these sorts of symptoms in nations where windmills are in much more common use than they are in the US. But we do not.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Everyone knows that the bad thing that windfarms cause is the slowing of the earths rotation.
yes I actually heard that from the mouth of one of the local nutjobs that are against the installation of a windfarm offshore.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What makes them sick is knowing that their neighbor is getting $5K per year per machine and they aren't.
Not quite 'sickness', but my aunt lives on the side of a large hill overlooking a pretty valley... Her balcony used to be a nice place to sit and relax. Now her down-hill neighbor (approximately 2km away) has a wind turbine in his yard and the low frequency periodic noise from it has transformed her balcony into an annoying place to be and she can no longer sleep with the windows open. She's not claiming sickness, she's merely claiming annoyance..
Okay so let's say that from right up in front of the thing you experience 105 dB of sound. Now let's use some basic math to compute what 105 dB at 0.5 meters away sounds like when you're 2,000 meters away. 32.958 dB should be the intense ear splitting result at the balcony. Does your neighbor have some super noisy form of wind turbine or does your aunt go insane inside a kitchen when the refrigerator is running? Does she have to turn her air conditioning and refrigerator off in order to sleep? Because according to every resource out there, physics put that noise at sub 40 dB. Even if we bump it up to rock concert levels (120 dB) it should be 48 dB at 2 km and that's about as loud as an AC unit.
Now, how loud is acceptable at the edge of someone's property before you think the authorities should be involved? And think carefully about people who like to use air condition/compressors, mow their lawns, have yard parties with music, drive motorcycles and do any good patriotic non-save-the-rainforest stuff before you answer.
My work here is dung.
The claimed negative health effects are spurious. I wonder what any of the hundreds of thousands of households located close to rail lines, expressways or airports must think when they hear people whinging about effects from wind generators...
The differences between the noises you cite and wind farms are as follows;
Consistency; The noise from a wind far is there usually 24/7 at a fairly constant rate. All the examples you cite are intermittent. There are periods if quiet between when trains and aircraft go by. When building roadways millions are spent on berms and sound fences to mitigate the noise. Even then there are periods of time, usually at night when people are trying to sleep, that roadways are much quieter.
Frequencies; This is a major factor. The frequency of a windmill is within an order of magnitude of that of the human heart beat. This closeness may cause physical issues.
A constant thump that resonates in one's chest 24/7 is very different from a train going by every 5 to 10 minutes.
Yes windmills kill some birds and bats. In North America the reported bird-kill from windfarms is a fraction of the kill from oil and gas operations.
Could that be because the number of wind farms are a fraction of the number of oil and gas operations? If the number of wind farms exceed the number of oil and gas operation that may change.
.... and several orders of magnitude lower than the number of birds killed annually by.... house-cats. Like birds? Don't let your stupid cat out.
Sorry by two wrongs don't make a right. Just because cats are worse than windmills doesn't mean that windmills do not cause significant damage. The other issue is that using raw numbers is misleading. Windmills have been found to kill a larger proportion of large endangered birds, raptors for example, than cats. Cats, on the other hand, kill a much larger proportion of smaller birds such as starlings and sparrows. Killing a few hawks is much more damage than killing a few hundred starlings.
I am currently on the fence at this issue as I have seen no controlled studies on the effects of strong low frequency sound.
People aren't getting any wiser, and propagandists are getting smarter too. While Fox News pushes *extremely dumb* ideas, it does so in a very slickly manipulative way that precisely targets the vulnerabilities of their demographic audience, effectively conditioning them to act less intelligent than they could be.
Other mass media companies do the same thing, as do advertizing and public relations businesses. They get paid for that.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
They should install some garish but non functional thing on them, a big box on the side that has blinking lights, a fan, some cables and some steam-punkish looking stuff on it.
Then tell everybody they are "Windmill Disruption Dampeners" and that the company went almost bankrupt buying them for the residents.
Placebos work, even if the person KNOWS it's a placebo. ;)
The problem with wind farms isn't just the silly people surrounding it but the ecological risks and damage done. In NA our bat populations are critically endangered and being destroyed by the pressure differential caused by various wind farms, if you bother to count the bodies. It sounds OK until you realize that bats are incredibly useful, they pollinate more than bees do, they control more insect pest populations than anything else. A single bat can eat many thousands of mosquitoes in a night.
In countries with more wind farms the damage is magnified. See Costa Rica. If only more people even gave a shit.
Do you have actual data to back up how many bats are being killing by wind gennies? I recalled people opposed to wind gennies saying they killed a lot of birds. However studies have shown cats kill more birds than wind generators. The article Do wind turbines kill birds? has a chart of statistics showing how many birds are killed by different things, from cars, wild and feral cats (but not pet cats?), to windows. Some may have a problem with the chart though, out of seven killers of birds 5 of the statistics are provided by the American Wind Energy Association, one by treehugger, and one by American Bird Conservancy. Sciam asks the question Are Wind Turbines Getting More Bird and Bat-Friendly? It partially answers by saying stake holders from AWEA, ABC, and National Audubon are working on ways to reduce bird and bat mortality rates.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
General Electric-designed reactors in Fukushima have 23 sisters in U.S.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies.
"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don’t. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
Oh, about CATO:
"The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization — a think tank – dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace. Its scholars and analysts conduct independent, nonpartisan research on a wide range of policy issues."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
So they are getting smarter...but more lazier? Maybe that is a better hypothesis.
Or they have just become less capable of using proper grammar.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Or they have just become less capable of using proper grammar.
When eight hundred years old you reach, use grammar as well you will not.
Every stat I could find on Scotland tourism says it's remained steady, even through the 2008 crash, and that it's slated to rise in the future.
OH MY EFFING GOD the libertarians will find the government at fault for anything and everything won't they? Enron and the crisis they caused and profited from were a result of deregulation. Flat out. The "changes" that were made to the regulations? They were made to encourage a free market and competition. But there's no competition if there aren't any players with any power. And BOY OH BOY did those fuckers abuse what little power they were given.
Owning both electrical generation and the distribution of that electricity was made illegal.
Yes, they split power generation and power distribution. That's one part of it. It made for a system of competition so that there were no longer territories of my generators and my neighbors generators. It set up a system where the old boys kept control of the distribution, and the new kids were given the generation, both were given a doggy biscuit and some ground rules for playing nice, and then set upon each other.
That "capped retail price"? Think about that for a moment. The entire point of this deregulation thing is to lower the price of electricity to the users. Alright, that's the goal. That's the entire point. That's why they did this. They believed the free market would work it's magic and they'd see lower prices than in the old regulated system. If they can't do that, if the system on the whole doesn't produce prices below a certain point, GUESS WHAT? It turns out that deregulation doesn't work. The cap let the pain of a broken system land in corporate-ville rather than raping the customers. At least, you know, the excessive pain.
Now let's pretend that they DIDN'T cap those prices. Enron does it's dirty work to manipulate the system and set record prices as they did before. But now the retail sellers simply pass it on to the users. WELCOME TO MONOPOLY SHITSVILLE where you can't choose which utility company to buy your power from! The competition was supposed to be between the distributors and the generators, not between the users and the power companies. Now it turns out that the generators, Enron and such, simply won that competition. Albeit from dirty tricks and accounting fraud. And the distributors suffered. But the caps kept the people from suffering AS MUCH AS they would have without such caps.
The entire crisis was caused by the state government.
Yes, it was caused by the state government DEREGULATING the power industry and giving more control to corporate entities. It was a pretty bad move that they shouldn't have done. Some things you can't trust in the hands of businessmen. Like those things with natural monopolies. Like utilities. Congratulations, you found where the government made it's fault.
But how many of those 23 are likely to get hit by a giant tsunami?
sustainable living
Fukushima's problem was caused by flooding in the basement where diesel generators were.
Not according to Kirk Sorensen, a nuclear technologist who operates the site energyfromthorium.com who for Forbes wrote the article Explainer: What Caused The Incident At Fukushima-Daiichi. At first he writes "The tsunami destroyed the diesel generators that provide power to drive the pumps that circulate the water coolant through the reactor that removes decay heat." But a bit later he writes generators ran "until their day tanks emptied" of diesel fuel. If emergency generators were running then they could have been refueled. The hard part would of been finding the people who were willing to put their lives at risk. However anyone who supports nuclear power should be so willing, if they aren't willing to put their own lives at risk why do they support putting other people's lives at risk?
All of the mentioned things could potentially cause enough problems in nuclear plants, but they would need to huge (like >7.75 magnitude earthquake *directly* under the reactor)
The title of the article Earthquake threat to nuclear reactors far higher than realized sums it up pretty well. Risk from earthquake is up to 24 tymes higher than previously thought.
people should be smart enough to shutdown the reactor & do other preparations in time as hurricanes can be detected way earlier than tsunamis/earthquakes.
And what of tornadoes? They aren't as predicable as hurricanes. And at specific points they strike they are more powerful than hurricanes.
The biggest reason I oppose nuclear power though is because nuclear power is Hooked on Subsidies
"How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don’t. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
If all energy subsidies were dropped, including for fossil fuels and nuclear power then geothermal, solar, wind, and other clean(er) energy sources would be more cost competitive. Coal get tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Without government loan guaranties Wall Street would not finance nuclear power. And if fossil fuels had to pay all of it's costs, instead of passing on external cost to others, their cost would be higher.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?