The difference is that coffee will actually very minutely increase your risk of certain cancers (and reduce your risk of others). Microwave radiation on the other hand won't.
It might at short range in high concentrations, but ramping things up to the lab-experiment points that generate "may cause cancer" warnings is the equivalent of the Mythbusters "it didn't work but now let's try explosives".
In fact, to the extent any potential harm exists, the characteristics of 5G would likely make it far less harmful; 5G does a far better job of managing both direction and power, whereas older cell technologies are more indiscriminate.
World capital of NIMBY turns down development because NIMBY. Not surprised, just disappointed.
From the article: “Reduced radiation emissions from 5G antennas compared to 4G antennas would presumably further reduce any health effects of this technology.”
So, they ban a technology which reduces the radiation they are concerned about while leaving a technology which radiates more than the tech which was going to replace it with.
Because 1% of the residents decided to chime in and offer their advice...
From the same people who also have lower vaccination rates for their children than average...
Not sure what exotic microwave you have, but it’s a very well known fact microwaves are 2.4ghz. It’s a contributing factor to why that frequency is part of the ISM band.
I live in a part of unincorporated Marin county (Tamalpais Valley) that has a Mill Valley postal address, and the discussion about this issue on our local NextDoor was BANANAS. You could satirize this situation any way you like and it wouldn’t come close to how terrible and anti-science the comments were.
Meanwhile, I don’t even have cellphone service of any kind at my own house, not even 3G/4G, thanks to a combination of hills and NIMBYism about more towers. My family has to rely on a combination of a microcell and WiFi calling. It’s infuriating.
Actual discussion:
Guy: Come to this meeting or else they might put a 5G cell on a telephone pole right outside your house!
If it makes you feel better, the discussion of 5G on Nextdoor in Oakland was and remains bonkers. It’s not Marin, it’s people of a certain age. There just happens to be more of them in Marin.
Piedmont Nextdoor is similar. Bunch of people with no background in RF health effects or non-ionizing radiation tissue interaction arguing pointlessly with conspiracy theory website as supporting evidence. Seeing a few scientists (in other fields) try to respond is exasperating. I don't bother.
Whole Bay Area, I guess. Remember, the city of Richmond (California) passed a resolution against orbiting mind-control satellites. It’s juat wacky around here.
That wasn't about resident safety, it was about a moral position against war. IIRC, those went up in the 80s when residents wanted to ensure that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory couldn't legally do the kind of weapons-directed research that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory did.
One of my physicians won't take me seriously because he's had too much of them and their abuse of the internet. He would rather that I stuck to exactly what he had prescribed - that was failing - than humour me, my degree, and my academic journal access.
Fortunately, the specialist he referred me to was pleased with the steps I have been taking.
I can't really blame the first specialist - I'll concur that he is going to do the greatest good to the greatest number with his tactic. But, it means that our interests are in conflict: not an ideal relationship to have with your medical counsel.
I'm sure doctors see a ton of patients that disregard their advice and fail miserably in the process. It's probably quite rare for a patient to say "you know what? I fucking got this" and be right.
not an ideal relationship to have with your medical counsel
It's a reasonable relationship to have considering you'll only spend an hour or so a year in direct consultation. In some sense it is ideal. He's putting you on notice that you can't rely on his advice in such a context because he has neither the access nor the diagnostic resources to personalize his advice, neither in the moment nor especially on an ongoing basis. Time budgeting is at the root of many professional relationships and their tensions. If you want more personalized advice, you have to be prepared to pay for it.
I've run some ideas past doctors and have always tried to make clear that I understand any thumbs up or thumbs down is contingent on the absence of complicating factors. But that's a difficult position in which to put a doctor, lawyer, engineer or most any other professional. Even if they agree to play along, the value of their affirmation is questionable.
Far more people in Marin County will die from diseases caused by air pollution from cars, exasperated by the bay area's inability to properly zone development and build real mass transit solutions. You would think that they would try to fix the actual problems in their community, but I guess it's easier to set policy based on an article they read on some conspiracy blog.
Anyone who's sat in Bay Area traffic wants changes -- don't let that cloud the facts: car based transportation is not a major source of emissions in the Bay Area, and overall emissions have been dropping since at least 1990 [1].
Particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5, aka the stuff that causes disease) is less than 20% due to on-road vehicles. The big sources are "combustion" (burning organic matter) and fires. [1]
I just wanted to suggest that respiratory health issues caused by vehicle traffic may be a more complicated issue than the metrics of that report suggests.
Oh my goodness! Don’t they know that rubbing essential oils on your temples prevents brain cancer from cell phones? I also recommend a pinch of night shade.
Worries about Ghz radiation at probably less than 100 watts from a tower that follows inverse-square, then walks around outside under 1000 watt per meter at the ground terahertz radiation from the nuclear fireball in sky that actually is ionizing and can cause cancer...
Be careful that light-bulb in your room puts out 10-100x the radiation of your cell phone.
Doesn't radio have inverse cube falloff? That's the thing that somewhat worried me about mobile phones, it has inverse cube falloff and has to speak to a tower miles away, so putting it against your brain for hours on end (I don't like calling, so that's not an issue to me) seems like a bad idea.
But the tower has a very sensitive antenna, so your phone doesn't need to put much power into transmitting. The effect of the phone on your brain and body is small compared to ordinary thermal noise at your body's temperature.
> putting it against your brain for hours on end
If you're going to be talking that much and are worried about this (which I don't think you need to be, but everyone has to make their own judgments), you can use a bluetooth headset. Bluetooth transmit power is an order of magnitude smaller, at least, than cell phone transmit power.
It's inverse square -- think of it as the surface area of the sphere a specific distance from the source at any given instant. Not the volume of the space between the frontier and the source.
Although the free space attenuation is inverse square, interference effects can increase power attenuation for radio waves in the far field limit. If there is reflection off the ground, the power attenuation is closer to inverse quartic in the far field.
Geometry in three dimensions requires inverse square.
You probably have incident on your body more energy sitting under a light bulb than from a cell phone, not to mention the nuclear fireball in the fucking sky.
Lumping different wavelengths into the general of "radiation" isn't really scientific. And adding more technical-sounding hyperbole to the conversation doesn't actually help.
Power drops off with the square of distance in free space. To get power of an RF wave you S = E x H [1]. Both the E & H fields decrease with distance. If you double the distance and both E&H decrease by half then |S| decreases by a factor of 4.
Interestingly though, in some environments you can actually get better than free space loss. I remember an off-hand comment from a professor in university that in concrete tunnels you can get R^1.6-1.8 because the tunnel acts as a waveguide
Doesn't matter whether it's radio or light or sound; if it's a point source (zero-dimensional) in three-dimensional space, it's inverse square falloff. If it's a line source (one dimensional), it's inverse (one over first power of distance) falloff. This is why fluorescent lights are so effective at illuminating large warehouses: At near distances, they are approximately line sources.
What an odd comment. What are the errors and who noted them? Right now there's only one "correction" and it appears to be in agreement with the original post. Did the OP reverse his point or am I misunderstanding someone?
I did quickly write out the post without putting much thought or research into it.
On power vs intensity since our distance from the sun is relatively fixed intensity is a better unit while distance from a radio tower is variable so power is a better unit. I also figured that a smart crowd like this would appreciate that you would be exposed to much less radiation standing next to the tower than standing in the sun and that it falls off at inverse square from the tower.
So I always forget technically ionizing UV is not in the terahertz range, however ionizing like damage to human biology does start in that range and is not a thermal effect.
The lightbulb statement was power and again was just a quick way of trying put it in perspective.
The impact of the source of radiation on living organism depends on the wave length of this radiation, not only power. A light bulb and 5G antennas have very different wave lengths.
You can say what you like but one thing is clear: there is absolutely no consensus among scientists that EM radiation from mobile phones has absolutely no negative influence on human health.
There is no consensus that a light bulb has absolutely no negative influence on human health. You receive much more radiation from these devices than cellphones.
Radio is much lower frequency than light, once you get below the UV spectrum the only known effect that light and radio have is thermal, that is heating flesh, ie heat lamps, microwave ovens.
Yet everyone walks around outside under orders of magnitude higher intensity radiation that has full scientific consensus to cause cancer without giving it much thought.
I for one am not worried about my cellphone that has the power output of a led penlight.
I understand your argumentation and I'm happy you're convinced, and I'd like to be, too. However, I did some checks on the people signed here: https://emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal and at least some seem very serious, knowledgeable and definitely not lunatics.
THere is no consensus, but there is also a upper limit on the total damage. Epidemiologically, there isn't any strong evidence this radiation has influence enough for us to care. Every high quality study has found no effect or a tiny effect, much smaller than the total benefit of mobile phones. Many people publishing in this space aren't good at quantitative research and make common errors, yuet the mainstream media ends up publishing the "shocking" results and convincing people it's dangerous.
I live in Mill Valley, and I must admit, sadly, I was passively following the controversy on Nextdoor merely for entertainment value. (It was absolutely bonkers. 375 posts on the thread last time I looked.)
I did not think the city council would actually act on this. Putting on my big-boy pants to go fight this.
Help please! I need ammunition -- if you have links to peer-reviewed research refuting the nonsense, please share.
Point out that the sun gives them more energy per time.
Point out that light bulbs probably give them more energy per time.
Tell them to hold up their hands to a light bulb (or do this yourself) so they can see visible light from light bulbs are enough to penetrate the skin, yet we don't get sunburnt sitting under a light bulbs all night.
Frequency matters, not just energy. There’s a reason microwave ovens operate at the frequency they do.
You’d be better off citing evidence that the frequencies used in 5G don’t have adverse long term effects on biological systems.
We’ve had millions of years to evolve complex biological systems to deal with the radiation from visible and UV light spectrum. Microwave radiation, not so much. It’s fine for people to be cautious.
You're right, the point is as long as you're below UV, then you can think in terms of dielectric heating is the important take away, because it's only when ionization can occur that you start to care about cancer I guess. But no, the reasons why microwave ovens work have less to do with their frequency than UV interactions do, which are QM in nature. The only real effect wavelength has in classical EM matter interactions is penetration depth.
Anything longer wavelength than visible light has less energy per photon and thus can't ionize, that goes beyond saying, may be I should have opened with that. The only thing that matters after that is intensity and penetration depth.
> You’d be better off citing evidence that the frequencies used in 5G don’t have adverse long term effects on biological systems.
This is going to be a subject of a long battle between two camps of scientists with contradictory results coming up every now and again.
The amount of investment in 5G is simply too high for it to fail, there's no way it's blocked even if some studies demonstrate a negative impact on human health.
> According to the city, it received 145 pieces of correspondence from citizens voicing opposition to the technology, compared to just five letters in support of it — a ratio of 29 to 1
There’s a joke in New York political circles about the technological ineptitude of our elected governments being virtually guaranteed by the correlation between technological domain knowledge and political disengagement.
Yes, and AT&T too. It's non-existent at my house in Tam Valley (unincorporated Marin county but Mill Valley post office and school district), except for the extreme back corner of my garden.
More worryingly, basic cellphone coverage is not even available at some of the Mill Valley elementary schools. When there was an active shooter situation earlier this year at an apartment complex near one school, there was no way to call most people at the school to check on them or to let them know.
Under 47 USC § 332(c)(7), the FCC can administratively set aside local laws regulating cell towers if the FCC determines the regulations are based on the local government's perception of safety risks related to RF emissions
> No State or local government or instrumentality thereof may
> regulate the placement, construction, and modification of
> personal wireless service facilities on the basis of the
> environmental effects of radio frequency emissions to the
> extent that such facilities comply with the Commission’s
> if the FCC determines the regulations are based on the local government's perception of safety risks related to RF emissions
Which creates an incentive to the localities to create other pretexts. The FCC could try anyway, but it would have to pick its its fights.
...and that's not a bad thing. It's good for various groups (in this case local councils) around society to be able to push back against centralized diktats. The issue here is that (a) such groups are often batty, and (b) the pushback comes in the form of saying "no" to what is other people's business.
I suspect that this is why some of the people here were trying to argue that having 5G service on nearby telephone poles will negatively affect their property values. That way they can claim the problem is not "on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency emissions" but on other people's perception of those effects.
Can you blame them? If they don't particularly value having the service, and have been informed of [0], of course they don't want this in their backyard.
Does Mill Valley already have 4G coverage, or have they stayed completely dark? If it's the latter, I can at least empathize. If it's the former, then the objection seems at least a bit misguided considering this should reduce the power levels relative to 4G.
Gosh Baby Boomers. Spends all day in Nextdoor and City council meetings and comes with ridiculous proposals like banning 5g or stopping housing projects. City councils are also extremely responsive to their bogus movements, like preserving neighborhood character.
Or the contempt comes from the state of feelings, anecdotes, and persuasion trumping science, data, and logic. Hard to argue rationally against “but I feel like pigs might fly” by starting with your own feelings on the topic.
Turns out that recent studies say you’re wrong. Counter-intuitively, making rational, fact-based arguments actually makes “them” reject scientific fact even more strongly. Look it up.
Which is why you decided to leave out any details?
Given the quality of the average study I'm not going to drop my arguments for the yelling. "There is a study" means little or even nothing at all.
Also, I think I read about what you mean and I think you are misinterpreting it. Of course in the end human life is all about emotions and what controls inside your brain what evidence is accepted naturally is quite complex or we would not have that "old scientists need to die" meme, but it does not mean at all that arguments don't ever work.
The problem with the average argument - don't know if adding "especially on the Internet" is justified or if it's actually not much different than the rest of life - is atrociously bad. I would not be persuaded by most arguments made to me and I think that this is very rational.
There is more than one side to this. The problem is good arguments take a lot of effort and time - and it's an iterative process. It needs someone to take somebody else seriously, mostly to be able to "read" the other person, what their issue actually is. Very often it isn't what somebody says. The brain puts thoughts into words not like a computer, where what you get on the outside is a correct representation of internal state. Instead, human speech is itself an iterative process and develops dynamically. For example, it may very well be that what somebody really needs is somebody they feel they can trust, rather than that they need the actual details. Even worse, while you say things, if you really put effort into it, _what_ you think may very well change too!
That lack of trust is an issue for very good reasons in large parts of our society is a fact, unfortunately. I think the discussion is full of "barking at the wrong tree". Yes, I think technical arguments won't help because underneath there is a severe lack of trust in authorities, medical, technical, administrative. Which quite frankly I don't find irrational.
I think arguing about frequencies and what they do is like trying to treat the skin problems of a severe disease instead of the underlying cause. Of course, it is much - MUCH - harder to get at that underlying cause, which is way to obig and hard to get at, far easier to go after the symptoms. Because to really treat such issues deeply would mean big changes to our society.
(theguardian)"The inconvenient truth about cancer and mobile phones"
"We dismiss claims about mobiles being bad for our health – but is that because studies showing a link to cancer have been cast into doubt by the industry?"
112 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadIn fact, to the extent any potential harm exists, the characteristics of 5G would likely make it far less harmful; 5G does a far better job of managing both direction and power, whereas older cell technologies are more indiscriminate.
World capital of NIMBY turns down development because NIMBY. Not surprised, just disappointed.
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-judge-rules-...
(On the basis that you're a little more likely to live long enough to get it.)
So, they ban a technology which reduces the radiation they are concerned about while leaving a technology which radiates more than the tech which was going to replace it with.
Because 1% of the residents decided to chime in and offer their advice...
From the same people who also have lower vaccination rates for their children than average...
5G will use frequencies around 3.5-4GHz. Wifi already uses 2.4GHz and 5.2-5.7GHz.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G
Meanwhile, I don’t even have cellphone service of any kind at my own house, not even 3G/4G, thanks to a combination of hills and NIMBYism about more towers. My family has to rely on a combination of a microcell and WiFi calling. It’s infuriating.
Actual discussion:
Guy: Come to this meeting or else they might put a 5G cell on a telephone pole right outside your house!
Me: OMG that would be amazing, yes please!
Fortunately, the specialist he referred me to was pleased with the steps I have been taking.
I can't really blame the first specialist - I'll concur that he is going to do the greatest good to the greatest number with his tactic. But, it means that our interests are in conflict: not an ideal relationship to have with your medical counsel.
I've run some ideas past doctors and have always tried to make clear that I understand any thumbs up or thumbs down is contingent on the absence of complicating factors. But that's a difficult position in which to put a doctor, lawyer, engineer or most any other professional. Even if they agree to play along, the value of their affirmation is questionable.
Issues like this only flare up in communities of rich, bored liberals, of which Mill Valley is the standard bearer.
Particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5, aka the stuff that causes disease) is less than 20% due to on-road vehicles. The big sources are "combustion" (burning organic matter) and fires. [1]
[1] http://www.baaqmd.gov/~/media/Files/Planning%20and%20Researc...
I just wanted to suggest that respiratory health issues caused by vehicle traffic may be a more complicated issue than the metrics of that report suggests.
Be careful that light-bulb in your room puts out 10-100x the radiation of your cell phone.
No, inverse square.
> has to speak to a tower miles away
But the tower has a very sensitive antenna, so your phone doesn't need to put much power into transmitting. The effect of the phone on your brain and body is small compared to ordinary thermal noise at your body's temperature.
> putting it against your brain for hours on end
If you're going to be talking that much and are worried about this (which I don't think you need to be, but everyone has to make their own judgments), you can use a bluetooth headset. Bluetooth transmit power is an order of magnitude smaller, at least, than cell phone transmit power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-ray_ground-reflection_mo...
You probably have incident on your body more energy sitting under a light bulb than from a cell phone, not to mention the nuclear fireball in the fucking sky.
Interestingly though, in some environments you can actually get better than free space loss. I remember an off-hand comment from a professor in university that in concrete tunnels you can get R^1.6-1.8 because the tunnel acts as a waveguide
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting_vector
THz is non-ionizing, for one.
OP suggests that THz radiation is ionizing - it is not.
OP maintains that a lightbulb emits "10-100x" more radiation than a cellphone - at what frequencies? Is he talking about power or intensity?
On power vs intensity since our distance from the sun is relatively fixed intensity is a better unit while distance from a radio tower is variable so power is a better unit. I also figured that a smart crowd like this would appreciate that you would be exposed to much less radiation standing next to the tower than standing in the sun and that it falls off at inverse square from the tower.
So I always forget technically ionizing UV is not in the terahertz range, however ionizing like damage to human biology does start in that range and is not a thermal effect.
The lightbulb statement was power and again was just a quick way of trying put it in perspective.
You can say what you like but one thing is clear: there is absolutely no consensus among scientists that EM radiation from mobile phones has absolutely no negative influence on human health.
Radio is much lower frequency than light, once you get below the UV spectrum the only known effect that light and radio have is thermal, that is heating flesh, ie heat lamps, microwave ovens.
Yet everyone walks around outside under orders of magnitude higher intensity radiation that has full scientific consensus to cause cancer without giving it much thought.
I for one am not worried about my cellphone that has the power output of a led penlight.
I did not think the city council would actually act on this. Putting on my big-boy pants to go fight this.
Help please! I need ammunition -- if you have links to peer-reviewed research refuting the nonsense, please share.
Point out that light bulbs probably give them more energy per time.
Tell them to hold up their hands to a light bulb (or do this yourself) so they can see visible light from light bulbs are enough to penetrate the skin, yet we don't get sunburnt sitting under a light bulbs all night.
To understand why they are bad: if you can't see them then you are effectively in the dark. And people are afraid of the dark.
You’d be better off citing evidence that the frequencies used in 5G don’t have adverse long term effects on biological systems.
We’ve had millions of years to evolve complex biological systems to deal with the radiation from visible and UV light spectrum. Microwave radiation, not so much. It’s fine for people to be cautious.
Anything longer wavelength than visible light has less energy per photon and thus can't ionize, that goes beyond saying, may be I should have opened with that. The only thing that matters after that is intensity and penetration depth.
This is going to be a subject of a long battle between two camps of scientists with contradictory results coming up every now and again.
The amount of investment in 5G is simply too high for it to fail, there's no way it's blocked even if some studies demonstrate a negative impact on human health.
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revela...
There’s a joke in New York political circles about the technological ineptitude of our elected governments being virtually guaranteed by the correlation between technological domain knowledge and political disengagement.
More worryingly, basic cellphone coverage is not even available at some of the Mill Valley elementary schools. When there was an active shooter situation earlier this year at an apartment complex near one school, there was no way to call most people at the school to check on them or to let them know.
> No State or local government or instrumentality thereof may
> regulate the placement, construction, and modification of
> personal wireless service facilities on the basis of the
> environmental effects of radio frequency emissions to the
> extent that such facilities comply with the Commission’s
> regulations concerning such emissions.
> 47 USC § 332(c)(7)(b)(IV)
Which creates an incentive to the localities to create other pretexts. The FCC could try anyway, but it would have to pick its its fights.
...and that's not a bad thing. It's good for various groups (in this case local councils) around society to be able to push back against centralized diktats. The issue here is that (a) such groups are often batty, and (b) the pushback comes in the form of saying "no" to what is other people's business.
Does Mill Valley already have 4G coverage, or have they stayed completely dark? If it's the latter, I can at least empathize. If it's the former, then the objection seems at least a bit misguided considering this should reduce the power levels relative to 4G.
[0] https://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/9890/2017-12-14/calif-...
Where there's already LTE, not so much.
I think the easiest way to persuade people is to engage them in a friendly way, listen, explain your feelings.
But maybe people on this thread thread don't care about making changes, but just venting some inarticulate frustration into the void of the internet.
Given the quality of the average study I'm not going to drop my arguments for the yelling. "There is a study" means little or even nothing at all.
Also, I think I read about what you mean and I think you are misinterpreting it. Of course in the end human life is all about emotions and what controls inside your brain what evidence is accepted naturally is quite complex or we would not have that "old scientists need to die" meme, but it does not mean at all that arguments don't ever work.
The problem with the average argument - don't know if adding "especially on the Internet" is justified or if it's actually not much different than the rest of life - is atrociously bad. I would not be persuaded by most arguments made to me and I think that this is very rational.
There is more than one side to this. The problem is good arguments take a lot of effort and time - and it's an iterative process. It needs someone to take somebody else seriously, mostly to be able to "read" the other person, what their issue actually is. Very often it isn't what somebody says. The brain puts thoughts into words not like a computer, where what you get on the outside is a correct representation of internal state. Instead, human speech is itself an iterative process and develops dynamically. For example, it may very well be that what somebody really needs is somebody they feel they can trust, rather than that they need the actual details. Even worse, while you say things, if you really put effort into it, _what_ you think may very well change too!
That lack of trust is an issue for very good reasons in large parts of our society is a fact, unfortunately. I think the discussion is full of "barking at the wrong tree". Yes, I think technical arguments won't help because underneath there is a severe lack of trust in authorities, medical, technical, administrative. Which quite frankly I don't find irrational.
I think arguing about frequencies and what they do is like trying to treat the skin problems of a severe disease instead of the underlying cause. Of course, it is much - MUCH - harder to get at that underlying cause, which is way to obig and hard to get at, far easier to go after the symptoms. Because to really treat such issues deeply would mean big changes to our society.
By the way, it is not true that radio frequencies can't cause cancer at all (and that we are certain of this knowledge), as I read in some comments here. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10926722 Yes that's very specific and extreme, they were right under the radar for much of their life. I read it first in the context of German Bundeswehr radar technicians (example: https://www.dw.com/en/german-army-cancer-victims-sue-us-rada...). Also: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/radio-frequency-radiatio...
https://www.autismspeaks.org/science/science-news/study-link...
"We dismiss claims about mobiles being bad for our health – but is that because studies showing a link to cancer have been cast into doubt by the industry?"
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/14/mobile-ph...
Here’s one example on the other side of the political divide:
I can’t remember a topic that both extremes agreed upon. Interesting that this is one.