How dangerous are wind turbines for birds?

Today I saw a very depressing picture on social media which seemed to show that wind turbines pose a serious danger to birds.

This made me wonder about the real risks and how they compare to other dangers faced by wildlife.

People are very bad at judging risk, especially lifetime risk:

So let's look at the numbers:

"Researchers estimate that 140,000 to 328,000 birds are killed every year in collisions with the turbines' spinning rotor blades and support towers."

"The number of animals killed on roads in the United States has been estimated at a million per day."

"About 350,000 to 27 million birds are estimated to be killed on European roads each year."

"Over 1 million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals are killed by pollution every year."

Obviously, there are many things which pose a bigger risk to birds than wind turbines. So what are the lifetime dangers for birds which we could contrast with human risks above?

"...the current educated guess is that there are 200 - 400 billion individual birds in the world"

Birds live between 2-30 years, so an average lifespan of 15 years seems reasonable. 

I'm going to be using this answer from stack exchange to roughly calculate lifetime odds of any "average" individual bird being killed by a wind turbine.

If:
global population = 300 billion
annual deaths = 200,000
Then the annual chance of being killed is 0.000666...%

So, probability = 0.00000666. (% / 100)
The probability of not being killed in any given year is 0.99999333.
The lifetime probability of death by swirly blades is 1 - (0.99999333)^15 or 0.0001 or roughly 0.01%.

Compared to the table above, the average bird has a 1 in 10,000 chance of being killed by a wind turbine. If it was a human living in the US, that's more likely than being killed by capital punishment, earthquake, dogs, bees or sharks. But less likely than being killed by the police, choking on your own food, or accidental gun shot. Not to mention cancer, diabetes, any motor vehicle accident or suicide.

An American human would be 100 times more likely to die of suicide than a bird is to be killed by the spinning blades of a wind turbine.

I've got an interesting opportunity here though. Because using the above equation and some estimates of the number of global deaths each year, it's possible to give a guess at your chances of being killed by air pollution.

Why is that important?
Because if we don't switch to renewable energy, namely solar and wind, as well as hydro power and geothermal energy, air pollution continues to be a real danger to us, even leaving aside the risks offered by global climate change.

According to this website, absolute number of deaths from pm 2.5 air pollution for 2015 was 4.2 million. Using global population for 2015 and a global average life expectancy, let's run the numbers:

0.000583% annual chance of dying from air pollution (around double if you live in China by the way, as nearly half of the deaths come from there...) works out at...

1 in 2,399
That's... pretty bad. About 5 times more of a risk to you than wind turbines are for birds.
For the average human, air pollution poses a fairly significant risk.

For the average US resident it would be 1 in 4,263. This reduction is mostly due to cleaner air and stronger environmental regulations in post industrial societies.
But it's not no-risk. In fact it's a higher risk than:

• Accidental gunshot accident (180%)
• Airplane crash (228%)
• Animal attacks (707%)
• Terrorists (1074%) 
• Illegal immigrant terrorists (3,211,800%) 

Such that you are 10 times more likely to be killed by air pollution than terrorists (if you include domestic terrorists).

I don't have the data I would need to calculate the direct risk that air pollution poses to birds, but I'd give you good odds it's far higher than the risk of flying in to a wind turbine.

I'm not a statistician, my major is Fine Art. But I can understand numbers enough to see where the real risks are in life. If I was a bird I would tell you:

"Build more wind turbines and less cars."