Look out for that turbine! Climate sceptics are the real Chicken Littles

The sky is falling! Oh wait, no: it’s just the clouds moving…

Sarah Smith

Several Australian corporate figures have recently disparaged climate scientists.

First, former banker David Murray questioned the integrity of climate scientists on national TV. Casting such aspersions on scientists follows the precedent set by the tobacco industry, which referred to medical researchers as an “oligopolistic cartel” that “manufactures alleged evidence.”

Attacks on scientists proceed according to the same playbook and regardless of discipline. If there is any novelty in Murray’s slur, it is that until recently he led the Future Fund, a body that is legally tasked with delivering risk-adjusted returns on the Australian Government’s budget surpluses. The adjustment of a risk by denying or ignoring it is arguably not without precedent; see the 2007 financial crisis, for example.

More recently, mining figure Hugh Morgan confronted the issue of risk head-on and declared the world’s climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to be “Chicken Littles” whose dire predictions would soon be cast aside, in the same way that the apocalyptic warnings of the Club of Rome from 40 years ago turned out to be false. (Except that when a CSIRO scientist reviewed those 40-year old projections, he found them to be remarkably accurate.)

Much is known in cognitive science about how people judge risks. It is now commonly accepted that those judgments are inherently subjective and subject to cultural biases, such as one’s attitudes towards the free market.

Thus, whereas the medical community lives up to its reputation as Chicken Littles by claiming that tobacco has adverse health effects, other institutions that arise from a different cultural background, such as Morgan’s Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), take a more heroic approach by chastising such “corrupt science” as overly alarmist. The trade-off between free-market fundamentalism and lung cancer is a matter of cultural preferences.

Perhaps then, mining executives are simply Courageous Real Men™ who can handle small problems like climate change — if need be with a bit of nuclear landscaping. Their tough but experienced hands will guide us to a safe future.

Perhaps.

There is, however, one problem, which is that this culture of heroic risk-taking falters at the sight — and the sound! — of wind turbines.

The Australian Environment Foundation (AEF), an organisation closely aligned with the IPA, has been a leader in the fight against the perfidious risk posed by wind turbines.

A recent peer reviewed paper by Professor Simon Chapman and colleagues at the University of Sydney confirmed the impressive success with which the AEF has alerted people to the hazard posed by “wind turbine syndrome”. The paper concludes that health concerns about wind turbines in Australia are primarily limited to those sites that have been visited by organisations with an anti-wind agenda. It found “the dominant opposition model appears to be to foment health anxiety among residents in the planning and construction phases.”

This health anxiety is non-trivial because wind turbine syndrome is a disease more terrifying than smoking, climate change, vaccinations, Communism, and GM foods put together.

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Bird slaughterers.