AI Wind - Chatham-Kent Health Report

The area surrounding Chatham-Kent has seen more than its share of wind energy activity. The C-K council, acting reasonably, asked the local acting medical officer, a Dr. Colby, to prepare a report covering the health impacts of wind turbines. Dr. Colby has no experience with wind turbines so he did the natural thing, which was to study the relevant literature in an attempt to come to a conclusion. His conclusion was that wind turbines presented no health issues. This result has been predictably played up all around Canada (scroll down to part 2, listen to the report, the glowing reference is towards the end), even referring to him as Canada's foremost expert.

Even Dr. Colby doesn't claim to be an expert on wind turbine health issues, so of necessity the validity of his report is dependent on the quality of his research. How good were the references he used to make his case? Were they valid, relevant, illuminating? He studied five different health-related areas, with the most controversial being (of course) Sound and Noise Concerns. I studied that section in detail: six paragraphs, 28 sentences and 32 references. I went through every sentence and where controversial I studied his references in great detail.

Its hard to express just how poorly this research was done. It's not that I agree or disagree with the conclusions - people of good will can arguably still do that. It's that the references were uniformly some combination of irrelevant, erroneous, non-illuminating and biased. And I didn't write the preceeding sentence lightly. What is most disappointing is that this report is portrayed as being authoritative, and so many people blindly take it so.

Unbeknownst to me, WCO had previously published a review of Colby's report, written by Dr. McMurtry. His conclusions generally agree with mine, albeit in a more authoritative manner. He is certainly more polite. This report is crap.

I prepared an examination that takes the reader through each and every sentence and reference, evaluating every one as needed, sometimes in detail. Wherever I could, I supplied links (if the report itself didn't, or was in error) to the cited reference so the reader could get back to the original documents and make their own evaluation of how closely the references supported Dr. Colby's statements.

I've moved the reports and some of the references to my site so I know they'll continue to be available, but feel free to google around and find them in their original web location, or use the links in either the report or my examination. Of the 32 references, I located 29 of them - or at least enough of them that I could fairly evaluate their contents. Of the missing three, the two government reports and one thesis will almost certainly add nothing useful to the discussion. PLEASE - my report is 13 pages long and takes maybe 30 minutes to read through. If you are at all interested in comparing the wind industry's (and I'm including Colby as part of the industry) rhetoric about "science-based" with the reality, take the time to read all the way through, regardless of what you think about health effects of wind turbines. I think you will find it illuminating.

This site, amherstislandwindinfo.com, does not pretend to be authoritive, since almost everything in it is at least second-hand. I guess people have different standards for what constitutes authoritive. It is certainly much better researched, over a broader range of issues, than Dr. Colby's report. If you want a more serious look at the issues surrounding wind energy, use the links at the bottom to look around.

The links below should open up new windows to make it easier to cross-check the material.