Weird how suddenly there are a bunch of “environmentalists” who for more than a century (we’ve been drilling offshore since 1896) couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the effect of offshore oil drilling on whales or anything else, but are now rending their garments and clutching pearls about the non-existent impacts of offshore wind turbines.
Oh, right, turns out it’s just a bunch of fascist billionaires with beach houses.
Check out this press summary of a new analysis from a senior scientist, then move on to some clips from that analysis.
“There’s absolutely zero evidence of any effect from what’s gone on so far at the wind farms and any serious impacts on whales,” said University of Rhode Island marine mammal biologist Robert Kenney.
Kenney, an emeritus marine research scientist at the Graduate School of Oceanography who has studied whales, dolphins and other marine vertebrates for 35 years, describes the conjectures linking offshore wind to whale mortality as misinformation.
Fed up with hearing so much on the subject over the past year as offshore wind construction has picked up off Massachusetts and Rhode Island, he wrote an article recently in Rhode Island Naturalist debunking the claims.
The title: “Science says that wind farms are not killing whales.”
Construction of offshore wind farms can be very loud. The piles that anchor wind turbines to the ocean floor must be driven deep into the sediments. To do that, they are essentially hammered into place. The sound from each strike can travel far underwater and has been detected by microphones at very low levels up to 60 miles away.
But developers are required to employ marine mammal monitors to look out for whales near the construction zones. They also use acoustic sensors in the water to detect whales. If the animals stray too close, construction activities are suspended.
Developers employ other methods to reduce impacts on marine mammals, such as bubble curtains that dampen the sound of pile driving. They also ramp up the sound of pile driving to give animals time to move away from any disturbance.
And swimming away is just what whales would do were they to encounter sounds that are too loud, said Kenney.
He said the worst-case scenario would be temporary hearing loss if a whale were in the direct vicinity of pile driving, but he emphasized that such a situation would be unlikely considering the precautions that are being taken.
We understand the physics of underwater sound really well,” he said. “We know what’s going on. You can measure the source level of a sound. You can calculate the distance it travels underwater. The sound sources that are out there, they are not loud enough to kill marine mammals.”
University of Rhode Island acoustician James Miller agreed with Kenney about the speculation blaming offshore wind for whale deaths.
“There’s really no scientific basis for any of the stuff we’ve been hearing over the past year or two,” he said.
Miller, chair of URI’s ocean engineering department, has studied sounds from the construction of every offshore wind farm in the United States, starting with the nation’s first, the Block Island Wind Farm, the five-turbine test project completed in 2016.
He followed that up with work on the two-turbine Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project and has continued with studies of Vineyard Wind and the South Fork Wind Farm, the two projects that have been in construction off Massachusetts and Rhode Island since last year.
Miller said that whales are tough animals that aren’t bothered by most man-made sounds in the ocean. The only proven exception is explosive dredging using dynamite, which was employed in Canada many years ago. There’s also inconclusive evidence tying military sonar to beaked whale strandings, according to Discovery of Sound in the Sea, a website Miller and other experts in ocean acoustics maintain.
Pile driving is very loud, but Miller said that because the waters are relatively shallow where the South Fork and Vineyard projects are being built, the sound is absorbed by the ocean floor and doesn’t travel as far as it would in deeper waters.
And the mitigation measures do help. His studies of bubble curtains found that they shave off about 10 decibels of noise from pile driving.
The species of most concern during offshore wind construction is the North Atlantic right whale, which is critically endangered. Developers have worked with advocates, government agencies and scientists to schedule pile driving to avoid the winter months when the whales are migrating through Southern New England.
Robert Kenney in the Rhode Island Naturalist:
About a week after the stranding, a popular blog called Newport Buzz published a column entitled “Block Island wind farm may have killed young humpback whale.”4 It had been posted by Christian Winthrop. but was a copy of an article written by Andrew Follett and published a little ear- lier by The Daily Caller, a conservative website founded by Tucker Carlson from Fox News (at the time) and Neil Patel, former adviser to Dick Cheney. (The Daily Caller encour- ages readers to re-post their articles elsewhere.) Other than simple statements like there being a dead whale on James- town, most of the information in the article was exaggerated, inaccurate, or just plain wrong.
There was a flurry of emails around the URI Bay Campus, and a brief response correcting some of the most egregious errors, signed by myself and Prof. Jim Miller, a bioacoustics expert from the URI Ocean Engineering Dept., was sent to and subsequently published by Newport Buzz.5 So just how many errors could there be in a short column of only 450 words? With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning—let me count the ways.
“Noise from the turbine allegedly hampers the sonar that whales use to navigate.” Humpbacks and other baleen whales do not echolocate; only toothed whales (e.g., sperm whales and dolphins) do.
“Ordinary operations noises from offshore wind turbines can travel immense distances underwater.” Dr. Miller and his colleagues monitored the sound produced by the Block Island Wind Farm (BIWF) turbines after they started operating in December 2015. At only 50 meters away, the sound is so low that it cannot be detected above background noise unless there is no wind blowing and no boat passing in the vicinity. At greater distances, a whale could not hear the turbines even on the quietest days.
“Water magnifies sounds, so underwater the pile driver’s noise can reach levels up to 220 decibels. Putting this num- ber into perspective, 150 decibels of sound can burst human eardrums, and 185 to 200 decibels is the range usually con- sidered to be the threshold for causing human death.” Although water transmits sounds better than air does, it does not magnify them. And the decibel (dB) is not an absolute measurement; it is a measure of difference from a standard level, on a logarithmic scale. Sound measurements in air and underwater use different reference levels, and the much higher density of water means that it takes more energy to create a sound of equivalent intensity. The correction factor to go between air and water is about 61.5 dB, so the under- water pile-driver source level of 220 dB would be equiva- lent to 158.5 dB on the in-air scale.
In December of 2022, a small group of Rhode Island resi- dents incorporated a new non-profit called Green Oceans. What soon became obvious was that their mission is to block development of offshore wind (OSW) facilities any- where near their community. Green Oceans is based in Little Compton—the third wealthiest community in the state, and three of Green Ocean’s six directors own large oceanfront properties there. They are using whales in their campaign against wind farms—publishing multiple letters to the edi- tor, op-eds, and a white paper. Similar groups have sprung up in Nantucket, Long Island, New Jersey, and probably other states as well—all opposing OSW development and at least some of them supported financially by groups associ- ated with the fossil fuel industry, climate denial, and anti- government libertarianism. Some of materials published by these groups cite the 2017 Newport Buzz column as “scienti- fic” evidence that wind farms harm whales (one reason for making such a big deal about it here). Many citizens are now convinced that OSW is hurting whales because of the torrent of misinformation telling them exactly that.
Many people from the scientific and conservation commu- nities have been kept busy trying to counter the rampant misinformation that Green Oceans and other similar groups have been disseminating. A group of undergraduate students from the Climate and Development Lab at Brown Univer- sity produced a report analyzing the range of deceptive tactics being used by Green Oceans in their campaign.7
One very frequent tactic is to use the word “take,” always with the scare quotes, to mislead readers into thinking that federal regulators are issuing permits to the OSW devel- opers that allow killing whales and other marine mammals.
Take is the term used in both the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act to define the full range of prohibited activities, from killing to injuring to simple disturbance to removing a souvenir from a dead seal on the beach or feeding a fish to a dolphin. Opponents will add up all the allowable takes in the Incidental Harassment Author- izations that have been issued or proposed for OSW pro- jects, then post something with the total numbers, but never clarify that (1) zero lethal takes are being permitted, (2) some tiny proportion (i.e., 0.25%) are “Level A” harassment that might include non-serious injury, primarily from the pile-driving (which did not start until June 2023 for the new wind farms), (3) by far the most, 99.75%, are “Level B” harassment, or temporary disturbance, and (4) the permitted takes are an upper limit, with permittees required to take mitigation actions to reduce their likelihood as much as pos- sible. But those large numbers then get translated some- where else to headlines like “Offshore Wind Industry Gets License To Kill Right, Sperm & Humpback Whales With Impunity.”
The numbers of humpback whale strandings in the mid- Atlantic states this past winter have provided these groups and their allies with an opportunity to blame OSW develop- ment, even though the recent strandings represent a contin- uation of the UME that started in 2016. Since very few tur- bines had been installed already (five in the BIWF and two off Virginia), these opponents placed the blame on the high- resolution geophysical (HRG) surveys being done for char- acterization of the bottom sediments at the proposed wind- farm sites. Sometimes the opponents conflate the HRG acoustic sources with very much louder sources such as naval sonar or the seismic air-guns used in oil exploration. In other cases they construct fanciful scenarios where the HRG surveys deafen the whales and/or panic them into shallow water where they strand, or are hit by ships, or encounter fishing gear and become entangled.
Given the lack of any evidence that OSW has any link to the on-going humpback UME, what could the explanation(s) be? First of all, note that the UME does not represent some- thing unprecedented—mortality rates were significant prior to 2016 (Fig. 1). There was a single-year spike of 21 dead whales in 2013, and the 10 mortalities in 2021 were below the pre-UME average. Even an increase in anthropogenic mortalities could have an underlying natural explanation, e.g., whales changing their distribution in response to climate-related shifts in prey patterns into places where they might be more likely to occur in areas of un-regulated fish- eries or in heavily trafficked shipping lanes. This appears to be precisely what occurred with the North Atlantic right whale UME. Their prey resources shifted as ocean waters in our region warmed, and some whales switched their summer feeding grounds from the Gulf of Maine to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The apparent result was 17 dead whales in 2017 and 10 in 2019, with vessel strikes and entanglement the only causes shown by necropsy results. Numbers in the other years were low and consistent with the years before 2017.
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