Medical Malpractice: Unmasking Doctors Who Hate Wind Industry Noise Victims

It’s no mystery to those forced to live next to wind turbines that the incessant low-frequency noise they generate is seriously harmful to health.

When humans set out to torture each other, sleep deprivation is usually top of the list. The wind industry has been doing just that, with impunity, for the best part of 20 years.

To that end, the wind industry has been ably aided and abetted by their pet acoustic consultants – a group of ethically bereft mercenaries, who willingly doctor up fake noise reports on demand; reports which always claim their client’s wind farm complies with the toughest noise standards in the world.

In addition, the wind industry enlisted the support of a group of pseudo-scientists (almost always sociologists with bogus claims to medical qualifications) who invented the notion that the suffering experienced by wind farm neighbours is all the product of their febrile, ‘climate denying’ imaginations, whipped along by ‘scaremongers’ like STT and the Waubra Foundation.

One of them, a former tobacco advertising guru, invented his very own diagnostic phrase, calling it the ‘nocebo’ effect.

The guru was so clever, that he could make such a diagnosis without ever having met a single person suffering the effects of exposure to wind turbine noise. With superior, if not superhuman, powers he was able to reach his irrefutable conclusions from the sandstone cloisters of a University in Sydney, thousands of miles away from the victims and their tormentors.

When an Australian Court was presented with evidence by the Waubra Foundation – both scientific and actual – of the harm caused by exposure to low-frequency noise and infra-sound generated by wind turbines, it had no difficulty in finding that that exposure was a pathway to disease: Australian Court Finds Wind Turbine Noise Exposure a ‘Pathway to Disease’: Waubra Foundation Vindicated

Like the guru, the political lobby group for Australia’s medicos, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) drank the Kool-Aid from the get go. As Maurice Newman details below, instead of listening to their patients, Australian doctors are far more likely to listen to Greta the Fretter and her hysterical claims that the planet’s about to fry.

Physicians fool themselves on the climate
The Australian
Maurice Newman
23 September 2019

Spare a thought for wind farm neighbours who suffer the health effects of audible and inaudible wind turbine noise. Think about how for years they have been trapped in unsaleable properties and told their symptoms were ­imagined or psychosomatic. How, when they turned to the medical profession for help, the Australian Medical Association and the National Health and Medical Research Council claimed they had found no “consistent evidence” of a connection.

No wonder.

Despite sufferers around the world increasingly presenting with common symptoms, the health authorities commissioned or completed very little quality ­research. What little research there was, victims argue, was shoddy and biased. Why?

Was it because health professionals didn’t want to rock the climate change, renewable energy boat? At least, after decades of ­inaction, the World Health ­Organisation finally concedes: “More than a nuisance, excessive noise is a health risk — contributing to cardiovascular diseases.” Pity about the patients who through the years have presented to their local GP with symptoms, only to be turned away on the advice of medical authorities.

By 2015, the AMA had nailed its flag firmly to the global warming mast with its Position Statement on Climate Change and Human Health. Today’s president Tony Bartone has gone further with his latest assertion: “The evidence is in on climate change — and it is irrefutable.” No ifs, no buts.

He warns “climate change is a health emergency” and talks of “Australia-specific effects”. A statement refers to “food insecurity resulting from declines in agricultural outputs”.

Yet Andy Pitman, Australia’s primary climate modeller, says: “As far as the climate scientists know there is no link between ­climate change and drought … there is no reason, a priori, why climate change should make the landscape more arid.” What do doctors know that Pitman doesn’t?

The AMA federal council frets about “significant linear associations between exposure to higher temperatures and greater mortality in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane”. Its members obviously missed the edition of the British medical journal, The Lancet, that published an international study finding that cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather. Analysing more than 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries, it reveals deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heatwaves or cold spells.

But the AMA has got the ­religion. It is ignorant of NASA’s warning of an approaching grand solar minimum, starting next year, which will be the weakest solar cycle in 200 years. Yet last time this happened the Earth ­experienced the Dalton Minimum, during which, for 40 years, the world was gripped by ferociously cold weather, disastrous crop losses, starvation and volcanic eruptions.

But, then, when Australian health and medical professionals meet to emphasise “the significant and profound impacts (global warming) has on the health of people and our health system”, no other conclusion is possible. Forget the science — just repeat “health emergency”. No correspondence will be entered into.

Of course, it’s also important to show solidarity for one’s overseas peers. In June, a group of 70 American health organisations took the lead with their “call to ­action”, describing climate change as “the “greatest public health challenge of the 21st century”. The British Medical Association followed with a campaign for carbon neutrality by 2030. Presumably, they are simultaneously preparing the British public for the necessary cuts to Britain’s health budget should their crusade succeed.

Bartone confirmed that the “AMA is proud to join the international and local chorus of ­voices urging action to address climate change on health grounds”.

Why not? Having the approbation of your peers at international conferences makes them more enjoyable.

But what does he think about energy poverty, which the rapid transition from cheap coal to ­expensive renewable energy is helping to create? Almost 50 million people in the EU are affected by what is ­defined as a set of conditions where “individuals or households are not able to adequately heat or provide other required energy services in their homes at affordable cost”. This is not to mention the problems caused by power ­intermittency and outages.

In Australia, electricity prices have ­increased by 117 per cent during the past decade. During the past eight years, it is estimated that power disconnections have increased by 47 per cent. Nationwide this equates to 160,000 households. None of them are doctors’.

Do these statistics even resonate with health professionals agitating for ever more radical government action to curb CO2 emissions? Or should the ­accepted principles of public health medicine — prevention and do no harm — be applied only selectively? Does a “climate emergency” justify the suffering of people today so that future generations can be saved?

Naturally, the rent-seeking ­instincts of healthcare professionals first look to government for energy safety nets for the poor and vulnerable.

Economic costs and fiscal responsibility are low-order priorities in their world. ­Indeed the AMA has gained a reputation for its “progressive” political advocacy. Former president Brian Owler was a Labor Party candidate at the past federal election. And a predecessor, Kerryn Phelps, was the green-leaning “independent” member for Wentworth.

But, then, bandwagons are commonplace in medicine and health management. The most important thing is to appear contemporary. Climate change is today’s fashion. It hides intellectual laziness and a disdain for the empirical evidence that clearly shows that today’s climate is actually quite stable. It reflects an ­imitative culture intent on projecting fear rather than spreading enlightenment.

The secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organisation, Petteri Taalas, shares this concern. He does not accept arguments that the end of the world is at hand and criticises “doomsters and extremists” for “provoking anxiety” and cherrypicking parts of reports they think will support radical action.

“This resembles religious extremism,” Taalas says.

Perhaps the AMA should listen?
The Australian