One of the coauthors of that paper, David O. Carpenter, is mentioned in Glenn’s article:
“One prominent expert witness who relied on the chart in testimony for years admitted that he had no idea that skin blocked the passage of high-frequency signals in particular. “…maybe it’s not that big a deal,” he said.”
Doesn’t fill me with confidence about the paper.
This is a pseudoskeptical dismissal.
The beauty of science: you can feel any you want when evaluating the science. You can be happy, sad, full of confidence, or even entirely lacking in confidence. It doesn’t matter at all; your personal feelings are irrelevant. All you have to do is download the paper and evaluate the science on its facts and reasoning.
Glenn is right: if there is a health impact from cellular phones, there must be something materially altered in our tissues attributed to the cellular phone radios. Reactive oxygen species is a good candidate. We already know about the risks of excessive ROS concentrations for other health issues. And note: Glenn didn’t mention ROS anywhere in his discussion to this point. In order to categorically state that these cell phones are safe, a discussion of this particular mechanism is mandatory.
Please read the paper. If you think the ROS risks outlined can be dismissed, please give us the facts–from the paper–that led you to that conclusion. That’s how scientific discussion works.
No, it’s a “we have evidence an author of this paper really has no idea of what they’re talking about” dismissal.
That sounds reasonable but it’s deeply problematic in two ways: 1. there are thousands if not tens of thousands of papers written on scientific issues and no one has the time to read them all, which means that it’s impossible to read one paper and understand how it fits into the larger scientific consensus and 2) as Glenn has pointed out, it’s reasonably easy to put together a credible scientific paper that is nonetheless absolutely misleading by making a range of different choices in organization and analysis.
In all the “bits of the literature” that you’ve read, did you download the data sets behind the articles to see if the authors were fiddling with things? Did you with this one?
As for me, I’m going to stick with my “we have evidence an author of this paper really has no idea of what they’re talking about” dismissal.
Oh Glenn. I hope this article doesn’t come back to bite you.
The question of wireless radiation causing cancer in humans remains wide open. The rodent test you (IMHO) cherry picked is at odds with two other rodent tests that verify one another and indicate wireless radiation can indeed cause cancer.
Here are relevant article links, all well worth reading:
Cell Phone Radio Frequency Radiation @NTP
5G And The IOT: Scientific Overview Of Human Health Risks
IARC, WHO: Move Radio Frequency Radiation from Class 2b to Class 1
As usual, the effects of exposure to EM radiation are a matter of:
We wait for further studies specifically relevant to human exposure.
There is no reason for paranoia or panic at this point. But wisdom dictates minimizing one’s exposure to wireless network EM radiation. One helpful rule is the Inverse-square Law. The intensity of EM radiation is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. IOW: Exposure drops off exponentially the further you are from your cell phone or WiFi device.
A possible exception would be when one is exposed while in the path of EM beamforming.
They are worth reading – for example, the first study shows that exposure to RFR actually lengthened the lives of the tested rats. Excellent! Time to get on my cell phone even more.
I would not try to prevent you from expressing your opinion, but the entire article is devoted to the extensive and still-growing set of evidence that finds no linkage between EMFs from regulated wireless devices and health effects. I call out the rodent study because it’s both recent and is an example of overreach, as it demonstrates what happens when you dig through data to find any correlation instead of looking at the effects as the whole.
I’ve read some of those links in the past and read others of them now. It’s critical to distinguish between high-exposure tests, which subject rodents to levels of radiation far beyond the outer safety limits of wireless devices, and those that look at regulated device exposure. This is discussed in my article. Groups like the US Brain Tumor Association lack scientific rigor and credibility.
We’re starting to devolve into a not particularly useful back and forth here, so I’m going to close comments on this article. Suffice to say that more solid, peer-reviewed science is always good, and given the attention this topic gets, I’m sure more studies will be done.