To be fair, the evidence about a link between cell phone radiation and cancer has been inconclusive for quite some time. After all, a series of inconclusive or null results doesn’t mean there is categorically no link – it could equally mean that more research is needed.
That said, I do agree that if there were a casual link in this case then it would have made itself apparent by now, given the huge increase in cell phone usage over the past few decades.
A series of null results is all we have regarding the hypothesis that winged monkeys can fly out of my arse as well, or the hypothesis that the pyramids were built by those same winged monkeys in exchange for pastrami sandwiches from Canters. Beyond a certain point, absence of evidence can be construed as evidence of absence, particularly when the test is specifically meant to detect a particular phenomenon.
Yes but the difference is that there were reasonable grounds to suspect that prolonged exposure to RF waves might possibly cause some harmful effects. The WHO didn’t categorize radio frequency radiation as a potential carcinogen based on no evidence at all:
It was still pretty out there. RF in these frequencies isn’t new. Radar installations have been using them for decades before, and at far higher power levels than what comes out of any cell phone.
Not only that, but today’s cell phones tend to use less output power than those old bricks from the '80s. If there were issues, we’d expect early adopters to be affected all the more, and there just wasn’t anything there.
Could there be a difference in how the signal works between radar, analog phones, and digital phones that causes a problem? If it had, it would have been a big surprise. Still, there was a crack of possibility open, which is now sealed shut.
WHO uses the precautionary principle a little too hard sometimes. If it was carcinogenic at all, it’d be at a very small rate.
WHO uses the precautionary principle a little too hard sometimes.
They have to be seen to do due diligence to respond to the assertions of crackpots. Otherwise someone will claim that they’re hiding something. That’s a political choice more than a purely scientific one.
It’s absolutely not inherently wrong or implausible to assume that the constant and rather direct exposure over decades causes cancer.
Old timey radio operators definitely died earlier. They had much higher cancer rates. Granted, completely different levels of radiation, but radiation damage is stochastic. If there is an effect at all, it will cause thousands of new cases even low doses simply because we have like 7 billion phone users.
Doing proper studies on that is hard, but absolutely necessary.
Really I’m gonna need a source for that old timey radio claim. Because that sounds like it’s made up and even if it’s not, correlation does not mean causation.
There is no known mechanism for non ionizing radiation to have ANY effect on the human body or individual cells besides from a warming effect. And even the warming effect is quite small, there are normally a lot of other factors that have a way bigger effect on the temperature. See the Mythbusters episode where they tried to warm a chicken on a radar emitter. The turning of the radar cooled it down more than any warming from the radar did.
If there is any truth to claims that non ionizing radiation harms humans, physicists would be all over that. That would mean new physics in an area where there hasn’t been any new stuff for a long time now.
But it turns out we understand it pretty well and see no mechanism for any harm to occur. In that context all of the studies that find no relation are meaningful. If there seems to be no relation and there isn’t a mechanism to do anything, why would anybody think there is anything to find? Turns out it always comes down to FUD, to further some kind of an agenda.
Right? Like they’re trying to equivocate and act like radio waves are this strange thing that science doesn’t quite understand yet, when in reality they’re unbelievably well-understood, and it’d be ridiculous to insinuate that radio waves passing through your body perturb it in any even remotely harmful way. The only reason this study had to exist is because of a bunch of psychotic quacks and grifters who say this kind of thing with zero evidence.
You would get more damaging radiation from the potassium-40 in a single banana than you would spending your entire life immersed in humanity’s ocean of RF waves, and that’s because a radio photon isn’t fucking ionizing.
Yeah, but biological systems have evolved to survive a baseline level of radiation, so there’s a threshold below which damage is repairable. The main reason for the linear dosage/effect curve being used in the literature is computational convenience. And even then, it depends on the effect. Heating effects, for example, may be fundamentally stochastic, but they’re subject to the laws of thermodynamics, so no matter how long your 100-mw source attempts to heat something, it will never boil. And it’ll still never boil if you run the experiment in parallel a million times.
Anyway, I think the stochasticity you’re referring to is more relevant to ionizing radiation. Mobile phones don’t emit that.
There’s a difference in dosage between exposure to RF from a 50kw radio broadcast mast or a long-range surveillance radar (which can cook birds that fly near the array) and the low-power signals used in mobile telephony. So in the case of mobile phones, the risk was at the least plausible end of the “inconclusive” range.
To be fair, the evidence about a link between cell phone radiation and cancer has been inconclusive for quite some time. After all, a series of inconclusive or null results doesn’t mean there is categorically no link – it could equally mean that more research is needed.
That said, I do agree that if there were a casual link in this case then it would have made itself apparent by now, given the huge increase in cell phone usage over the past few decades.
A series of null results is all we have regarding the hypothesis that winged monkeys can fly out of my arse as well, or the hypothesis that the pyramids were built by those same winged monkeys in exchange for pastrami sandwiches from Canters. Beyond a certain point, absence of evidence can be construed as evidence of absence, particularly when the test is specifically meant to detect a particular phenomenon.
Yes but the difference is that there were reasonable grounds to suspect that prolonged exposure to RF waves might possibly cause some harmful effects. The WHO didn’t categorize radio frequency radiation as a potential carcinogen based on no evidence at all:
https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf
The possibility of there being a link was not absurd, per se.
It was still pretty out there. RF in these frequencies isn’t new. Radar installations have been using them for decades before, and at far higher power levels than what comes out of any cell phone.
Not only that, but today’s cell phones tend to use less output power than those old bricks from the '80s. If there were issues, we’d expect early adopters to be affected all the more, and there just wasn’t anything there.
Could there be a difference in how the signal works between radar, analog phones, and digital phones that causes a problem? If it had, it would have been a big surprise. Still, there was a crack of possibility open, which is now sealed shut.
WHO uses the precautionary principle a little too hard sometimes. If it was carcinogenic at all, it’d be at a very small rate.
They have to be seen to do due diligence to respond to the assertions of crackpots. Otherwise someone will claim that they’re hiding something. That’s a political choice more than a purely scientific one.
All true, but that doesn’t disprove my point. The risk was non-zero, so it was still worth investigating.
It’s absolutely not inherently wrong or implausible to assume that the constant and rather direct exposure over decades causes cancer.
Old timey radio operators definitely died earlier. They had much higher cancer rates. Granted, completely different levels of radiation, but radiation damage is stochastic. If there is an effect at all, it will cause thousands of new cases even low doses simply because we have like 7 billion phone users.
Doing proper studies on that is hard, but absolutely necessary.
Really I’m gonna need a source for that old timey radio claim. Because that sounds like it’s made up and even if it’s not, correlation does not mean causation.
There is no known mechanism for non ionizing radiation to have ANY effect on the human body or individual cells besides from a warming effect. And even the warming effect is quite small, there are normally a lot of other factors that have a way bigger effect on the temperature. See the Mythbusters episode where they tried to warm a chicken on a radar emitter. The turning of the radar cooled it down more than any warming from the radar did.
If there is any truth to claims that non ionizing radiation harms humans, physicists would be all over that. That would mean new physics in an area where there hasn’t been any new stuff for a long time now.
But it turns out we understand it pretty well and see no mechanism for any harm to occur. In that context all of the studies that find no relation are meaningful. If there seems to be no relation and there isn’t a mechanism to do anything, why would anybody think there is anything to find? Turns out it always comes down to FUD, to further some kind of an agenda.
Right? Like they’re trying to equivocate and act like radio waves are this strange thing that science doesn’t quite understand yet, when in reality they’re unbelievably well-understood, and it’d be ridiculous to insinuate that radio waves passing through your body perturb it in any even remotely harmful way. The only reason this study had to exist is because of a bunch of psychotic quacks and grifters who say this kind of thing with zero evidence.
You would get more damaging radiation from the potassium-40 in a single banana than you would spending your entire life immersed in humanity’s ocean of RF waves, and that’s because a radio photon isn’t fucking ionizing.
Yeah, but biological systems have evolved to survive a baseline level of radiation, so there’s a threshold below which damage is repairable. The main reason for the linear dosage/effect curve being used in the literature is computational convenience. And even then, it depends on the effect. Heating effects, for example, may be fundamentally stochastic, but they’re subject to the laws of thermodynamics, so no matter how long your 100-mw source attempts to heat something, it will never boil. And it’ll still never boil if you run the experiment in parallel a million times.
Anyway, I think the stochasticity you’re referring to is more relevant to ionizing radiation. Mobile phones don’t emit that.
There’s a difference in dosage between exposure to RF from a 50kw radio broadcast mast or a long-range surveillance radar (which can cook birds that fly near the array) and the low-power signals used in mobile telephony. So in the case of mobile phones, the risk was at the least plausible end of the “inconclusive” range.