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Tuesday 30 April 2013

Getting It Wrong - Anonymously

It must be fun, publishing content anonymously. There are many advantages. One is being able to publish cruel vilification without facing any type of accountability. Another is the freedom of consistent wrongness - without the risk of tainting one's reputation. 

An example of this is the righteous and defamatory anonymous blog 'Stop these things'. 
A few months ago, I was featured on their 'These people don't [get it]' page. 


I try to re-use this picture wherever I can. 

Recently, Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University wrote on The Conversation about a piece of research in pre-print that shows the prevalence of health complaints is not always related to the presence of wind turbines - rather, the interjection of anti-wind campaigners serves as a better predictor of these complaints.


Recently, Anonymous claimed that:

"The former editor of the academic journal which received a study by Simon Chapman denying wind turbine syndrome has questioned the quality of his research
Dr Jeanne Daly told a fiery public meeting to discuss a proposed community wind farm at Baringhup in Victoria that “at best” Chapman’s evidence was “equivocal”."
Is Anonymous referring to Chapman's paper on the distribution of health complaints? The commenters certainly seem convinced. In fact, there's nothing in the post to suggest otherwise. 

Daly was the editor of the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Public Health (ANZJPH). It seems odd that the ex-editor of a journal would publicly criticise research that is still under review by that journal. I contacted Simon Chapman, and he brought to my attention this email - sent to Daly:


"I'm not sure whether you have been faithfully reported (a transcript is being prepared) but if so, it seems that you are confused about my work.
The paper that ANZJPH is publishing soon is this one: 'How the factoid of wind turbines causing “vibroacoustic disease” came to be “irrefutably demonstrated”'. "
"Another paper of mine (see pre-print here is under review with an international journal. It has never been sent to you."

According to Chapman, Jeanne Daly was referring to a completely different paper. Not an insignificant error. But hang on, doesn't that mean Chapman's paper on 'Vibroacoustic disease (VAD)' is shoddy? 

Nope. Chapman points out in his email that the VAD paper has been accepted for publication by the ANZJPH. 
One impassioned commenter writes:



Ask, and ye shall receive. 

Update 06/05/2013: The page has been wordlessly removed from their blog, with no acknowledgement of error. Don't worry, though - it's stored permanently on WebCite

Wednesday 24 April 2013

The Fictitious Uprising - Listed Professions


Listed Professions

In a previous post, I examined a list published by the European Platform Against Windfarms - comprised of 'professionals' who have expressed concern about wind farms. In that post, I looked at how their numbers are skewed towards countries that are Anglophone in nature - indicating that their concerns are related to a communicated, rather than physical, phenomenon. 

Let's have a look a their distribution across professional lines. The list is comprised of 78 total professionals. 41 of these have the term 'Dr' in their title. Not all of these are going to be medical professionals, though - I went through the list and did my best to identify those who are classified as health practitioners:

There seems to be 33 listed professionals that could be considered health practitioners - 8 'Rural medical practitioners', 6 'Ear Nose & Throat Specialists', and 5 'Medical practitioners', and a few others. 




The WHO estimates there are approximately 59,000,000 health workers worldwide. Thus, we can obtain a rough percentage of the number of health workers who have expressed concern about wind turbine syndrome. 

33/59,000,000 is 0.00006%

An angry refrain often directed at Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University, is that he is not qualified to comment on the wind farm health issues, as he is trained in sociology:
"As an academic discipline, sociology has never overcome the accusation of being either stupendously obvious or stupendously absurd.  Chapman’s Postulate illustrates the latter."
"Simon Chapman (Think healthy on wind farms, Monday March 18th) is not a medical doctor, but a sociologist"
"He is a Sociologist and surely is not in a position to know how to run valid experiments that need Scientific and medical evaluation?"
"On what grounds, as a sociologist, rather than an acoustician or a medical practitioner, do you disagree with Leventhall’s expert testimony "
A few professions from EPAW's listing:



My next post will be looking specifically at Australian doctors - what they state publicly, and what percentage of the Australian medical workforce they represent.

Wednesday 17 April 2013

Anecdotal Evidence

Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University, started compiling the purported 'symptoms' of 'wind turbine syndrome' in early 2012. 

His list currently sits at 216. It's big, and broad, and it's comprised entirely of anecdotal evidence. Anecdotes are generally regarded as the weakest form of evidence, in terms of scientific inquiry. 


This is because anecdotal evidence is subject to a few key problems:


- A small sample size, that isn't necessarily representative of a larger sample.


- Confirmation bias, the tendency to ignore evidence that disagrees with one's beliefs, and to place too much weight on evidence that agrees with one's beliefs


- It's subject to 'Cherry picking' - in this instance, the anti-wind lobby regularly points to a few cases of anecdotal claims of ill-health around wind turbines, but ignore the many communities that have seen no issues whatsoever. 


The size and scale of Chapman's list is truly incredible. In that vein, I've drawn his list up into an infographic, to better illustrate the clear issues with the unbridled over-use of anecdotal reports as primary evidence of an issue. 


[PDF] - 0.2 MB

[PNG] - 0.6 MB - 2197 x 1587
[JPG] - 1.2 MB - 2197 x 1587

Click to embiggen


References




Tuesday 16 April 2013

The Fictitious Uprising - English Speaking Countries

Consistency is important. When you are faced with a severe deficiency of empirical evidence, you must turn to tactic. The anti-wind lobby uses one tactic with regularity - the generation of enormous lists, riddled with errors, but extremely time-consuming to systematically debunk - it takes 10 seconds to lie, and 10 minutes to show that it's wrong.

Recently, the 'Eurpoean Platform Against Windfarms' (EPAW) published a widely distributed list of "health practitioners, researchers and acousticians who have investigated or voiced concern for the health and well being of wind turbine neighbors"

Totaling 78 individuals in a variety of professions, the data they present are quite interesting, and reveal some important facts about anti-wind activism around the world, and in Australia. 

I've analysed EPAW before. They seem to have been touted as an authority on global anti-wind groups - yet, their listings are comically inept.

I'll cover this in three different posts over the next few days:

English Speaking Countries
Listed Professions
Australia's Doctors

Let's have a dip, dear reader, into the EPAW's latest offering.

English Speaking Countries

I extracted the list and separated out the data. As it turns out, 69/78 = 88% of the professionals listed are from English-speaking countries. Remember, this list is generated by the European Platform Against Windfarms - supposedly, the authority on non-English anti-wind activism. 


Perhaps, though, we see this pattern because English speaking countries have much higher installed capacities of wind power. The same data, along with installed capacity:

The US seems to have a relatively good match between the installed capacity, and number of professionals expressing concern. After the US, the numbers go haywire.

Australia possesses 2,584/282,482 = 0.91% of the world's installed wind generation capacity, yet 15/78 = 19% of the list is comprised of Australians. 

Germany has an installed capacity of 31,332 MW = 12 times the capacity of Australia - yet EPAW lists only one 'professional' expressing concern - an oral surgeon, named Dr. Eckhard Kuck (as a side note, Sarah Laurie claims a group of 50 physicians was formed in Germany, worried about the health impacts of wind energy - reference links are now dead, and there is no information on the outcomes of the 'forum' organised by Kuck). 

China, Spain, Indian, Italy, France, Japan, Brazil and Poland have a collective installed capacity of 139,740 megawatts, ~50% of the worlds total wind power. EPAW do not list a single professional, from acoustics or medicine, having publicly expressed concern about wind power in these countries. 

By and large, the presence of wind turbine syndrome is skewed towards countries that are English-speaking, rather than countries that have a large installed capacity of wind power. This is determined using data presented by the anti-wind groups themselves - either their data is faulty / incomplete, or there is indeed a large skew towards anglophone nations. As Simon Chapman states:
"So if turbines were intrinsically noxious, why do they cut such a selective disease path? Why do citizens of community owned turbines in places like Germany and Denmark rarely complain? Why are complaints unknown in Western Australia where wind farms have operated for many years, but virulent in several small eastern Australian communities?"
The evidence that 'wind turbine syndrome' is simply the product of anti-wind groups spreading non-scientific health fears is compelling. As this evidence grows, I hope public awareness of the impacts of pseudoscience and scare-mongering grow too. 

The next two posts will cover the professions put forward by EPAW, and examine how representative their list in, in the context of health professionals around the world. 

Click here for the source data, stored as a Google Spreadsheet

Monday 15 April 2013

Devine and The Daily Telegraph

Today, Miranda Devine published a profoundly silly piece in the Daily telegraph.

She claims that, due to the 'bastardisation of climate science', people have come to distrust science - as they wander around on cold, windy days, they remember global warming, and consequentially, they throw vaccination to the wind: 
"In Vaucluse and Mosman, among the very people who drank most heartily of the climate Kool-Aid, are parents who reject the evidence that vaccination saves lives. They prefer to believe hocus pocus claims that immunisation against once-lethal childhood diseases leads to autism or brain damage."
Let's have a look at some of the articles published by the Daily Telegraph, with regards to vaccination: 
















Not all of their coverage of vaccination constitutes pseudoscientific scare-mongering, but they do possess their fair share of attention-grabbing, scary anti-vax coverage. The hypocrisy of Miranda Devine is mind-boggling. 

The Daily Telegraph bravely champion a scientific mindset. My heroes! 

The Daily Telegraph's variable attitude towards science reporting does not stop with the repetition of vaccination myths. Some other fun topics covered by The Daily Telegraph and their partners: 














CAN YOU FEEL THE SCIENCE? 

Let us end with the infinite wisdom of Miranda Devine:
"But we should also sheet blame for the rise of irrational beliefs where it belongs, to those who corrupted science for ideological purposes."

Wednesday 3 April 2013

Journalism and The Black Cap

James Delingpole is non-human. Perched atop his prominent position as a blogger for the UK's Daily Telegraph, he churns out vicious anti-green blog posts with impossible frequency. It's probable that he's not even conscious when he writes them. His rhetoric is robotic. On Twitter, he baits and insults those fool enough to succumb to his undeniably sharp taunts. He hates wind farms.

In the latter end of last year, two events seem to pointedly damage his motivation to continue attacking wind energy. 

Delingpole recently applied to run for an election in Corby, in the United Kingdom, as an independent anti-windfarm candidate. As it turned out, he had been convinced to run by his opponent, conservative MP Chris Heaton-Harris, simply to push the issue of wind energy up the agenda. He withdrew before his nomination was finalised

About a month later, the Australian Press Council released 'Adjudication 1555', admonishing The Australian for publishing an opinion piece by Delingpole, in which he equated the wind industry with 'a paedophile ring'. Delingpole responded with:
"I stand by every word of the piece – especially the bit about paedophiles. I would concede that the analogy may be somewhat offensive to the paedophile community."
Though his response was unabashed, his propensity for attacking wind energy seems to have become muted. You can represent this quite simply, by assessing his Twitter history - using the search terms 'wind' and 'farm', we can see quite clearly how these two events, in November and December 2012, coincide with a big drop in his references to wind energy.


Despite this drop-off, Delingpole's tactics remain static. This morning, The Australian published another piece by Delingpole. A standard measure of half-truths, misrepresentations, and primary-school statistical errors are proferred by Delingpole, all unsurprising and in no way worth debunking. Wind farms are only mentioned once. Curiously, he finished off the surprisingly tame piece with this far-from-tame line:
"The climate alarmist industry has some very tough questions to answer: preferably in the defendant's dock in a court of law, before a judge wearing a black cap."
The 'black cap' to which Delingpole refers was worn by judges when handing down a death sentence. One could argue here that Delingpole is simply calling for the end of the 'climate alarmist industry'. One could also argue, as Bernard Keane states here, that he is promoting the execution of climate change activists. The mere existence of this ambiguity is reprehensible. Delingpole's propensity for murderous imagery and aggressive hyperbole seems to sit well with The Australian's editorial agenda.

Recently, Chris Berg of the Institute of Public Affairs gave evidence before the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee inquiry into the News Media Reform Package 2013. He had the unenviable task of defending Delingpole's 'paedophile ring' article:

CHAIR:  So Mr Delingpole was using satire, was he?
Mr Berg:  I think in many parts of that article he has a very satirical pen.
Blogger Greg Jericho points out the relevance of these remarks to the new article, here. The likelihood that Delingpole was actually lampooning the frothing, cross-eyed hyperbole of professional wind farm critics seems quite low. Berg also defends the publication of the article on the grounds that, though one may disagree with Delingpole, the right to freely speak his mind ought not be removed or constrained:
Mr Berg:  He is quoting a farmer. I do not understand what the objection specifically would be to. You might think that is an exaggeration of the true position. You might think that is unfair. But this is the nature of a free and open discussion. People who exaggerate, who use satirical strategies and all this sort of stuff—you have to allow that in a free and open country, in my view.
The issue of media reform and regulation in Australia is complex. It is arguable that the publication of vile, cruel remarks by media outlets should be regulated by an authority. Aside from this worthwhile debate, I feel these articles bring something else to the fore.

The tactic of using fierce, cruel insults, combined with casual fictions, is firmly in the realm of desperation. Both Delingpole and The Australian resort to the juvenile futility of provocation and lies. Delingpole's drastically bruised ego may be causing him to shy away from wind energy, but there's little chance he'll ratchet down his attempts simulate relevance in Australia's media landscape. We can rest assured that their allergy to journalistic integrity signals their decline into irrelevancy.

As The Australian continues to torment their already twisted, mangled imitation of journalism, the Institute of Public Affairs, rightly or wrongly, continues to defend our right to insult, offend and falsify in the public sphere. I sincerely hope that the habit of publishing depraved, harmful insults dies a speedy, natural death - without the need for that metaphorical black cap. 

Tuesday 2 April 2013

Ten Good Things

The unenviable byproduct of a British upbringing is the burden of a massive dose of cynicism. Positivity? No, thank you. Sunlight? I shall pass, my good man.

This shines through in the content on this blog - it exists mostly to negate claims that are already made, rather than to promote novel statements about wind energy. Recently, I came across a blog post from the fantastic Journalisnt, who have been kind enough to host my musings in the past. It's is a list of ten things that are wonderful, splendid and fantastic. As the author states,
"It’s kind of a way to challenge one’s own negative bias, kind of a way to give a shout out to things you like."
Working in a fledgling industry can sometimes be challenging, perhaps to extremes I did not foresee. Yet, these extremes are rich, enduring and memorable - more so than the static, barely-perceptible trajectory of some unexciting, entirely predictable career. Despite the inevitable downs, and the reassuring ups, I still bear an immutable love for science, technology, logic and data. 

I find myself deeply intertwined with wind energy technology, and I happen to genuinely enjoy several aspects of this particular configuration of  fibreglass, wires and electrons. These things extend beyond the steel walls of the machine - they comprise everything I've experienced and seen, in the relatively short time I've been part of the renewable energy industry.

So, these ten things are not the best things, or most important things. They are ten good things.

Karl the Lake Bonney Site Cat

Karl is a black cat, who lives at Lake Bonney wind farm. She was originally spotted by one of the technicians, on site - stray, hungry and mildly unfriendly. The person who took her in thought she was a boy, and so, she was named 'Karl'. Karl seems vaguely effeminate anyway, so it's not too wild a transgression.


February 2010 - Karl sits atop a crate, at the Lake Bonney site office

I like Karl. She's healthy, and extremely weird. During a site visit in 2011, I sat in the site office, working on my laptop - Karl sat beside me, furiously batting at the mouse cable that hung near her face. Her concentration broke suddenly and she was infected with a powerful urge to scratch desperately at my jacket. 


No, Karl. Jackets are not for eating. 

I also spent a fair bit of time watching Karl chasing what can only be described as nothing. She sat, crouched and determined, watching an empty pocket of air. She pounced, grabbed at the nothingness, and then proceeded to strut meaningfully away. Karl is content living at a wind farm. 

Science, Kids and the Australian Museum 

Not too long ago, I was working in the Operations and control centre - the part of Infigen where we monitor the wind farms remotely, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In 2011, I had the chance to take part in a question and answer session with seven different primary schools through a fantastic video conferencing system, at the Australian Museum

Kids like wind turbines. They're impressed by size, and they like technology. But, more than anything, they're inquisitive - ideology seems to be alien to them, and so, they simply soak up information with an inimitable eagerness. It was fun. These are the individuals who are going to be dealing directly with both the impacts of climate change, and the ever-increasing impetus for changing our generation tech. 


The conference room, plus various animalia

Kids are little scientists - they seem to relish both inductive and deductive inquiry. Their fondness for understanding the mechanics of the world, rather than purely engaging in delusion, is brilliant. 

A beefy new interconnector

The average household consumer does not really worry about how the states in the National Electricity Market (NEM) are connected. As it turns out, interconnection is a big issue. South Australia has a significant installed capacity of wind power. Wind energy is variable - its pattern of generation does not always follow the pattern of demand. Consequently, there are times at which demand may be low, but wind generation may be high. 

When this happens, usually very early in the morning in South Australia, generation simply drops off. A lot of wind farms shut down, in response to massively depressed price levels (in the negative region). In the near future, they won't need to shut down - the capacity for electricity to be exported from South Australia to Victoria is being upgraded


An snapshot diagram of interconnected states - arrows indicate flow

Electranet's decision is a good thing - this means more electricity from renewable sources can be utilised, and the spoils of carbon-free power can be spread more widely across the NEM, and to a greater number of Australian households. 

Standing really close to a wind turbine

Not many people have been up close to a wind turbine. It's easy to underestimate the size of one, simply looking at it from a distance. It's an optical illusion that occurs because the nacelle and the rotor are, from our perspective, framed only by the sky - consequently, we have no reference to judge their size. 


I took this last week (27/03/2013) at Capital Wind Farm - beautiful day
Up close, you get a feel for the silent majesty of these machines. Usually, we associate size with noise. For instance, a coal truck is incredibly large, and unsurprisingly, incredibly noisy. We expect big things that move to make a lot of noise. Yet, when you stand beneath a wind turbine, watching tons of fibreglass and steel rush overhead, the sound level is astonishingly low


The sound spectrum of a wind farm recording, from here

This contradiction, between large size, rapid movement and low sound level, is something I find oddly marvelous, and a lot of people express the same sentiment during wind farm tours. 

Good Lovin's 

In addition to having the best name in the history of mankind, Amory Bloch Lovins delivered a brilliant talk at TED in May 2012. He outlines the changes we need to engage with, bravely and surely, over the coming decades. In his words:
"Four-fifths of the world's energy still comes from burning each year four cubic miles of the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo. Those fossil fuels have built our civilization. They've created our wealth. They've enriched the lives of billions. But they also have rising costs to our security, economy, health and environment that are starting to erode, if not outweigh their benefits.
So we need a new fire. And switching from the old fire to the new fire means changing two big stories about oil and electricity, each of which puts two-fifths of the fossil carbon in the air. But they're really quite distinct."
Watch it. It's worth it. The sentiment he expresses is, definitely, a good thing. 



Experimental Wind Turbines

Experimental technologies are cool, and wind energy has its fair share of weird and wonderful fledgling innovations. Not all of them will take off, but some of them will, and outside of the actual economic and technical viability of the machines, they are simply fascinating products of imagination, inventiveness and innovation. 

There are many, but here's one: Air-borne wind turbines, tethered to the ground. 



Another is the poetic 'windstalk' - hair-like cilia that bend when the wind blows, and generate energy. 





Strandbeests

Theo Jannsen is a Dutch artist, responsible for designing and building 'Strandbeests' - wind powered sculptures that roam beaches, powered purely by wind. They are truly incredible, and extremely beautiful. The artist describes them as 'new forms of life'. 

To me, they capture the poetry of harnessing the kinetic energy stored in the wind. This energy is ancient and ubiquitous, and it breathes life into these seemingly self-aware sentinels. To extract energy from the wind is to blend physics, science and natural laws with engineering, environmentalism and the classical human need to invent. 



The painted wind turbine at Hepburn Wind

As part of the sustainable living festival in February 2013, Hepburn Wind, Australia's forefront community wind farm initiative, called in the efforts of Ghostpatrol, a Victorian artist. He painted a beautiful mural on one of the wind turbines.

The idea of using a wind turbine as a canvas for art has an incredible amount of potential, and I really hope we get to see more of this sort of thing in the future. 

Some photos, below. 





Check out the Hepburn Wind Flickr stream for more. 

South Australia's Wind Energy

South Australia has, by far, Australia's greatest proportion of installed wind energy. For July 2011 to June 2012, wind energy contributed 3,349 gigawatt-hours of energy to the NEM (26% of total energy generated in the state). Coal contributed 3,007 gigawatt-hours (24%) (note that you need to also take into account interconnector flows in and out of Victoria - check out the AEMO report linked below for more info on this) 


Click here for the full PDF report
We can see that wind contributed meaningfully to electricity demand in South Australia. This is a good thing - a large amount of energy (remember, that's after we take into account capacity factor) was sourced from renewables in South Australia. 

Wind Map USA

Data is great, but I also like art. 'Wind map', created by a coupe of Google engineers, combines both to create an incredible and dynamic visualisation of wind energy in the United States:



The graphic is mesmerising, and neatly represents how wind power varies, churns and flows across a continent. It's also based on real-time data, acquired from a database, and drawn together in an intelligent and aesthetically pleasing format. 

Those are ten good things. There are many more.