Windfarms irritate people in unique ways. It’s something I’ve paid keen attention to since I started out in the wind industry as a data analyst. The machines seem to provoke a discussion far from the norm, when it comes to energy technologies.
For instance, in May 2012 The Australian published a column by conservative climate sceptic blogger James Delingpole, in which he quotes an unnamed sheep farmer declaring the wind industry equivalent to a paedophile ring. The Australian Press Council upheld a complaint against the line in question.
What fascinates me is the logic that drove a national news outlet to publish it. Buried in windfarm data and live monitoring screens, I didn’t expect to be reading a national publication comparing me to a child rapist. It was baffling.
The Pacific Hydro “debate” has driven us down this same weird, dark corridor. In this instance, the tone and the rhetoric are less explicable than in previous years.
In January, a study commissioned by windfarm operator Pacific Hydro purportedly found a link between the operation of the Cape Bridgewater windfarm and “sensations” reported by residents.
But Pacific Hydro’s report doesn’t seem to say that. I dug into the appendices, and found that nearly half of the “sensation” reports were logged during times of low wind or windfarm shut down (an indicator that the study didn’t measure what it thought it measured).
The six participants were not randomly selected, and as the ABC’s Media Watch pointed out in a story aired on 16 February, the author of the study states that “No, it’s not correct … You can’t say that noise affects health from this study”.
The Media Watch story was in reference to rolling coverage granted to the study in The Australian, penned by the outlet’s environment editor, Graham Lloyd (you can find his articles here, here, here, here, here and here).
Two more responses to the Media Watch story – 4,688 and 5,473 words respectively – were published on The Australian’s website, claiming the Media Watch report is littered with mistakes and that the assertions made in the paper’s original coverage – that the report demonstrates a causal linkage between windfarm operation and health impacts – stands.
It’s in these most recent pieces that we see the true depths into which this issue has plunged. Particularly, Lloyd’s point-by-point response to Media Watch becomes stranger as you progress through it.
For instance, Lloyd tackles the question of whether animals are impacted by windfarms:
No, animals become physiologically stressed when exposed to wind turbine noise (eg the Taiwanese goats who died, reported by the BBC, confirmed by the goat farmer and the Taiwanese Agricultural authorities
And, later in the lengthy piece, goes on to explain why a small sample size is a valid method for establishing causation:
Tiny samples are fine. Patients are a sample of one. Just one patient (or one black swan) is enough to prove a scientific point. In his peer review of the Cooper Research, Dr Paul Schomer said “One person affected is a lot more than none; the existence of just one cause-and-effect pathway is a lot more than none,” he said. “It only takes one example to prove that a broad assertion (that there are no impacts) is not true, and that is the case here.”……SIX BLACK SWANS. All of them experienced the symptoms when the turbines were turning …. But not when they were not exposed to operating turbines and there were no wind gusts
As philosopher Patrick Stokes pointed out, the “black swan” analogy – referring to the occurrence of a highly improbable event – actually only applies to arguing against a claim, rather than proving one. But the distinction disappears in Lloyd’s weird discursive abyss. He continues, addressing criticisms that the research wasn’t published:
Oh, if something is not published in a journal it is not good science? Well what about PhD’s??? They are not published in journals? Are they not “science”?
The lengthy response ends with a truly surprising non-sequitur:
It Is also about time the ABC started accurately identifying conflicts of interest in its “experts” and stopped putting pre-recorded programs to air which refer to vulnerable and sick rural residents as “DICK BRAINS” — Annabel Crabb on the science show, aired by Robin Williams in January 2015
What?
We’re back in a weird spot, and no one knows how the hell we got here. Crabb’s comments on the Science Show were in the context of how improbable it is that telling people their symptoms are “fake” will change their mind:
[T]hat person’s response is not ever, ever, ever going to be to say, ‘Thanks for helping me out with that, I now realise what a total dick-brain I’ve been, thank you very much.’ That person will go on an online forum and say, ‘I can’t believe what just happened to me,’ and find 50 other people who say, ‘You are right and that person is a lunatic.’ And that’s effectively what we are talking about here.
But usage, and context, are forgotten in the weird world of windfarm politics.
The bad blood between The Australian and the ABC goes a fair to way explaining these strange efforts to “take down” the Media Watch story. But there’s another story, buried underneath the confusion, that’s significantly more interesting to me.
Why is it that a handful of “black swan” occurrences of sickness – each with no clear connection to windfarms – are considered sufficient to prove “wind turbine syndrome”, but a global consensus among the world’s scientific organisations isn’t considered enough to declare certainty on anthropogenic climate change? I’ve seen this attributed to ignorance, or motivated deception, but I strongly suspect it’s neither.
We’ve ended up at this weird spot – swarmed by angry bloggers with worn-down caps-lock keys – because our interactions with scientific evidence are skewed by our worldview.
The CSIRO’s 2014 report on community attitudes towards science explains that values skew the way we interpret the declarations of scientific authorities. We also tend to retrospectively deny that we’ve engaged in this filtering process in the first place. Instead, we create awkward, ad-hoc justifications for why we chose to reject or accept information acquired through science.
The Australian’s value-based filtration of scientific outcomes isn’t abnormal, but it is dangerous. The outlet publishes more than its fair share of articles sceptical of the scientific consensus on global warming. Propping up this worldview may satisfy some portion of its readership, but it doesn’t alter the reality of our atmosphere.
Similarly, readily reporting bad science on windfarms isn’t going to do anything to help communities that feel they’ve been wronged. For that, we need better community engagement and ownership strategies from the wind industry. Either way, this isn’t the first time we’ll be baffled by what we could call “windfarm weirdness syndrome”, and it certainly won’t be the last.