Whenever the subject of windmills comes up with Donald Trump, usually because he brought it up, entirely unprompted, he always brings up a bizarre “condition” called wind turbine syndrome.
Due in part to the fact that he is a deeply stupid individual, he believes that the sound of a wind turbine turning and turning, infinitely, in its ceaseless quest to generate energy, can eventually drive a person mad.
A Polish study found that wind turbine syndrome is complete bullshit and that maybe Trump should shut the fuck up about it already. That last part wasn’t their conclusion, it was mine.
The researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University have specialties in neuroscience and acoustics. Donald Trump’s expertise is being a corporatist who repeats whatever half-remembered gibberish an oil lobbyist spat at him during a round of golf.
In the study, researchers played 45 college students the sound of environments with different sound profiles — traffic sounds, silence, and the mechanical hum of wind turbines. To eliminate bias, the participants were never told what the purpose of the study was.
The participants were then asked to identify what the sounds were. Not even one of them could differentiate the sound of a wind turbine from the common ambient noises of life. Or, to quote the study’s authors, the sound of a wind turbine is no more “stressful or bothersome than road traffic noise.”
So why do people like Donald Trump complain about it? Because wind turbine syndrome isn’t an actual malady induced by green energy as much it’s a social disease present in people “primed by watching online information about health problems from wind turbines, reported more symptoms after being exposed to recorded infrasound or to sham (fake) infrasound,” according to the author of a different study on the origins of wind turbine syndrome.
This isn’t a groundbreaking study, either. Studies on the existence of wind turbine syndrome have been going on for at least a decade now, conducted by different teams from around the world with no connection to each other. The same conclusion they keep reaching over and over again is that it’s all bullshit.
The emerging truth of the “syndrome” is that people exposed to anti-wind turbine propaganda find themselves suddenly and inexplicably experiencing symptoms of wind turbine syndrome. It’s all a bunch of made up of bullshit that has more to do with political and ideological affiliation than it does your proximity to a wind farm.
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