In our last post James Delingpole touched on the story of how wind weasels have been aware of the impacts from infrasound and low frequency wind turbine noise since 1987.
STT predicts that – in the not too distant future – there will be a swag of wind swindlers dragged before a Senate Inquiry or a Royal Commission being grilled about what they knew and when about the impacts on human health from giant industrial wind turbines.
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When that happens – and it will – just as night follows day – STT thinks the scene will play out a lot like this:
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Just substitute “nicotine” with “infrasound & low frequency turbine noise” and “addictive” with “harmful” – and you’ll be pretty close to how wind weasels, their goons from the Clean Energy Council and the Slick-Willie acousticians that run cover for them – will play it.
Here’s a little fore-taste from The Australian.
Wind turbine dangers known since 87
Graham Lloyd
The Australian
9 July 2013
HEALTH impacts caused by low-frequency noise from wind turbines have been known to US researchers and the renewable energy industry for more than 25 years.
American researchers used mock homes, big speakers and seven volunteers to simulate and measure the impact of low-frequency noise produced by early model, two-blade wind turbines under controlled conditions.
A November 1987 report prepared for the US Department of Energy said the impact of low-frequency noise generated by wind turbines was often “confined to within surrounding homes” and that residents became more sensitive to the impact over time.
The laboratory experiments found that “people do indeed react to a low-frequency noise environment”.
The study, A Proposed Metric for Assessing the Potential of Community Annoyance from Wind Turbine Low-Frequency Noise Emissions, was prepared in response to earlier research into “acoustic disturbances” associated with the operation of a wind turbine near Boone, North Carolina.
It found that the standard A-weighted measure for sound was “not an adequate indicator of annoyance when low frequencies are dominant”.
The research was sent by an American acoustics expert to Australian wind health campaigners and has now been published internationally.
The US report built on earlier research by two NASA facilities and several universities. It was presented to the Windpower 87 Conference & Exposition in San Francisco by physicist ND Kelley from the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado.
Wind health groups in the US and Australia said although modern wind turbines were different to the one studied, the 1987 research was significant because industry noise-testing regulations had been specifically designed to exclude testing inside buildings and did not concentrate on low-frequency noise — the two main issues identified in the report.
A federal Senate inquiry recommended two years ago that in-house testing be conducted in Australia but it is not included in the present noise guidelines.
Clean Energy Council policy director Russell Marsh said the study was not relevant to modern turbines.
“This is the equivalent of taking a study about Ataris and applying it to the latest iPads,” Mr Marsh said.
The US research was conducted on older-model wind turbines which the CEC said were known to have noise problems as the blades were exposed to airflow patterns caused by the wind swirling its way through the supports of the trestle tower structure before flowing on to the blades.
“Australia has some of the toughest noise guidelines for wind power anywhere in the world and there is a growing body of more recent evidence that wind turbines do not produce enough low-frequency noise or infrasound to directly cause health problems,” Mr Marsh said.
But other research has shown that as wind turbines get larger, a greater proportion of the sound is emitted in the lower frequency range.
“The (US) research is highly relevant, even though the acoustic emissions themselves are different between old downwind turbines and upwind ones, where the turbines turn around to face into the wind,” Waubra Foundation chief executive Sarah Laurie said.
“What is important is the impact on the people from the sound energy emitted from the respective wind turbines, how it is experienced by them inside their homes and the acknowledgement that the symptoms are real, and that the symptoms may be perceived but not heard,” Dr Laurie said.
Health campaigners said the results of the laboratory simulations in the US study proved there was a direct cause-and-effect relation between the low-frequency noise and “annoyance”.
The National Health and Medical Research Council has said there was no published evidence linking wind turbines to health impacts. The NHMRC is conducting a review of its advice but its updated report on the issue is now overdue. The South Australian Environmental Protection Agency has recently completed a major sound monitoring program at Waterloo where there have been significant complaints from residents, but the results are not yet available.
The Australian
Someone in the piece above is spinning a whopping yarn. To help you work out who it is – have a listen to the sound of the latest “iPads” at work:
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So – if that’s what modern “iPads” sound like – thank your lucky stars they scrapped the Ataris.
STOP THESE THINGS 
Thank goodness for investigative journalists with integrity and clarity like Graham Lloyd.
Let us hope there are many more principled and courageous members of his profession to continue to expose the rotten core of this bullying industry which has lies, misinformation and contempt for country people at its heart. So like CSG.
Thank you STT.
Does Marsh think scientific research stops after each project? Research of any kind builds on and utilises what’s been done before. If low frequency noise was a problem in 1987, then it should have been a constant research process to ensure future turbines did not have the same problems. Its indicative of the power the industry has that they have been able to smother this truth for so long. It is indicative of the shameful way in which some acousticians, engineers and others have been shown to be unethical in their approach to researching of this industry.
For the industry and those who work in it to continue to deny there is a problem is completely unacceptable, and our Federal Government MUST now act on the Senate recommendations with NO FURTHER DELAYS. A moratorium should NOW BE CALLED to halt any further installations whether in production, commenced or just in the ‘pipe-line’ until the research has been conducted across the whole spectrum of this industry.
No further public money should be handed out unless it is for independent research, though the industry having been paid so much public money without having to prove compliance should be forced to hand money back for independent research under the control of an independent authority – NOT the government, not the NHMRC, not the industry.
Come on STT – be fair on the wind industry bad boys! A bit more “science” in video taping your wind noise would help!
The noise in the video is only associated with the movement of the wind turbine blades – this does not consitute direct conclusive evidence that the wind turbine is actually causing the noise. You need to politely ask the Hepburn mob to turn off their bloody wind turbines during windy weather just to make sure it wasn’t the natural inaudible wind infrasound that was causing this audible and unnatural hellish noise.
If you’re lucky to have gone this far in your “science”, then your evidence will automatically be discredited by the wind industry because your just anti-wind activists working for the coal industry. And your video camera suffers “nocebo…”
I really hope you struggle to take this recommendation seriously. If you can, then please consider wind turbine as certainly “addictive”. Odd sods, like David Clarke, find wind turbine noise “relaxing” and another associate of his finds it “almost mesmerising”.
http://ramblingsdc.net/Australia/WfSpeech.html
Operating industrial machines do not belong in the countryside. They do not belong next to people’s homes. And now we find that they knew the physics of why this is so 25 years ago. Shameful.
The facts are that the noise is there to hear, let alone the low frequency noise and infrasound that people can only feel.
Now we find that they knew all along that the low frequency noise profile is worse inside people’s homes than outside and that it correlates directly with the level of annoyance experienced by those poor unfortunate souls that were in the path of the sound pressure waves being produced.
You can be assured that the lying weasels will say there is not much noise from modern wind farms. But we now know, that they have always known, that the property of operating industrial machines that most annoys people in their homes, low frequency noise and very low frequency noise, can’t be measured by using standard A-weighting. So if your tools and techniques are not set up to detect it, that doesn’t mean that it is not there.
They will say that it is all operating within the guidelines – which say that the dB-A weighting is fine. But who wrote the guidelines? The wind companies.
I bet not one of the great lying weasels have lived anywhere near the industrial wind turbines for any length of time, if at all.