New Claim on RF Radiation Gets Even Crazier
September 1st, 2009
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By now, there have been claims that RF radiation, such as that produced by wireless networking, cell phones and alike, causes everything from cancer, to intense physical pain. There are those who say it is a weapon of the government to exterminate people or to control their minds. There are some who make their living on making up new ridiculous claims on this topic.
But this just might bring things to a new level of ridiculous…
In case you missed the best of the quotes on that ridiculous video, here it is:
Yes, that’s right, the information, not the “heat.” I suppose this is how they plan on explaining how it could possibly be that radio signals could cause damage even when the transmitter power and distance results in only minuscule amounts of energy being present. Thus far, all real science has shown that the only significant danger associated with non-ionizing radiation comes from high power levels which can cause damage to tissue due to dielectric heating.
I should add that I have not read the entire “BioIniative Report,” but you’re free to read it here. It is 610 pages, with a lot of appeals to authority, rambling about “precautionary principle” and very little scientific data. This is not the only source of this claim, however. Those like George Carlo have recently been talking about “Information Carrying Radio Signals”
“Information Carrying Radio Waves (ICRW) are the components that trigger adverse biological responses leading to health effects. ICRW come from people talking on the phone.” Dr. George Carlo, Ph.D, M.S., J.D.
So now I guess they even have an abbreviation for it.. Well, that sounds very scientific, doesn’t it?
So I suppose that the ICRW is the type of NIRA that is causing ES in the population of the USA, EU and CWIS. The FCC must protect our DNA and RNA ASAP.
Do I even need to explain why this is ridiculous? Our bodies do not in any way decode or demodulate signals. Signals are encoded with information using various modulation techniques. The information is encoded by varying the signals properties. This could be the signal’s phase, frequency or amplitude, depending on the type of modulation. The claim that modern “information carrying” signals are somehow unique or that they are “pulsed” is simply false. Older modulation schemes may pulse signals to convey information, but in modern systems like those used in 3G phone systems, the signals look just like static or random noise on a spectrum analyzer and will generally sound like radio static without the proper digital decoding hardware. This is simply because they are designed to utilize the avaliable bandwidth as efficiently as possible.
Aside from that, considering that the strength of the signal apparently does not matter, then I guess all bets are off, right? We can forget about worrying about the phone towers and wifi hotspots because even the minutest signal that carries information can kill us. That means that signals like those from deep space probes can be deadly, even if the entire Deep Space Network is required to pick them up, because it’s not the power, it’s the information.
I suppose I could imagine how the information could cause problems, if it is demodulated, but in that case, it is really the audio energy that causes the problem…
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Just LAME, Not Even Wrong, Obfuscation, inverse square. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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September 1st, 2009 at 11:22 pm
Would this then mean that the radiation from medical equipment, as you mentioned a few posts ago, could now be considered safe, as it carries no information?
What about microwaves? People freak out about them all the time, but last time I checked, my microwave wasn’t warming my food by bombarding it with pre-recorded conversations.
This whole thing just boggles the mind.
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September 1st, 2009 at 11:52 pm
The Curtains said:
Well, that’s ionizing radiation, which is entirely different. So I don’t know.
It also does carry some information… not on the way in, but on the way out, it carries information about the internal structures by how much it is attenuated. Not sure if that would count…
One can always fall back on the standard response: radiation from bananas and radon gas and uranium ore is good for you because it’s natural. Anything natural can’t hurt you. Only unnatural things can hurt you.
er… yeah…
So to be healthy just put down that artificial cell phone and go out in the woods and start eating some random natural mushrooms indiscriminately. That’ll keep you healthy!
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September 2nd, 2009 at 12:38 am
Umm…so I guess every cell has a wide-band demodulator in it (AM? FM? SSB??) that captures the “information” impressed on the carrier, and then tells the cells what to do?
DUH!
Whatta load of CRAP!
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September 2nd, 2009 at 1:10 am
Years ago my brother-in-law was posted to Oman as a military attaché, once told me of a group of locals enraged by a news item that some people had been busted for having unlicensed satellite television receivers. Apparently some had been caught watching some Western European porn feed, and their concern was that they were suddenly made aware that they were being exposed to this signal full of filth and were therefor being made unclean by it, irregardless of the fact they were not actively watching it.
There was a small flurry of outrage over this in the press until some Muslim authority went public saying that they were in the clear if they didn’t actually see it.
We laughed until we cried at the stupidity of this little farce, but frankly it makes more sense, being a strictly religious issue, than this does.
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September 2nd, 2009 at 1:35 am
In which case:
Reading spam from a monitor should cause cataract and blindness
Viagra anyone?
To paraphrase Winston Churchill
Never in the field of human endeavour has so much codswallop been distributed to so many, by so few.
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September 2nd, 2009 at 7:57 am
Oh god I actually just got around to watching that video (I was at work when I posted my earlier sarcastic comment).
One thing I want to know is when they claim that Sol Trujillo is a member of the “Australian Radiation Industry”, is that just meaningless scaremongering, or are they mistaking him for Telstra’s former CEO Ziggy Switkowski, who actually was the head of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization.
I actually worked as a telecommunications engineer for 5 years, and helped install the “Next Genocide” equipment, and nowhere in the very intense OHS (and Telstra is VERY intense with its OHS) training did anything even close to what this “BioInitiative Report” is claiming come up. Between this, and the recent flood of ‘media’ reports on TV about mobile phone dangers, I am at a loss for words.
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September 2nd, 2009 at 8:44 am
Oh by the way: The statement quoted above is on page 6 of the Bioiniative Report
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September 2nd, 2009 at 10:49 am
A perfect example of “Not even wrong.” This isn’t just incorrect it is complete bonkers.
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September 2nd, 2009 at 1:08 pm
I have actually seen this kind of nonsense a couple of times when looking at these idiotic sites. They claim that the radio waves are dangerous because of the “secondary frequencies” or the modulation on them and that this somehow creates frequencies that are “biologically active” or some rubbish like that.
This lacks a basic understanding of how these things work. Modulating a radio wave means either pulsing, varying the amplitude, varying the frequency or some combination of these. This can change the bandwidth that the signal occupies and make it more complex, but it does not change the fundamental nature of the energy or signal. It means that a carrier, which would just be one frequency and solid would be altered to a radio wave that is constantly oscillating in properties.
The signal does not look like anything but random RF noise really, unless you have the setup to demodulate it.. Except for AM, that requires a special layout of components to tune in the signal and process it.
Buzz is right that newer signals, like 3G (which is what they complain about) is not something that has a single modulated frequency like traditional single channel radio. It maximizes data by using every scrap of the spectrum it is allowed and it has multiple signals on the same frequencies using a method where each brief signal packet is individually addressed. It’s fascinating stuff, but it looks like noise most of the time, if you don’t have a properly programed DSP that can pick it apart and grab the relevant packets.
How on earth could modulation or bandwidth make a signal somehow alter biology? It couldn’t! This is all bull. The data on a radio signal is only relevant to the decoder that is capable of extracting it.
To use an analogy, this is like saying that beating someone over the head with two books of the same size, same shape, same materials, is going to be changed by what is written in them. Like if you’re hit on the head with Shakespeare you will be injured worse than if it is a physics textbook. That makes no sense. The books are physically the same, so what is printed on their pages doesn’t change a thing and doesn’t even matter until you open them up and start reading.
They are grasping for straws. People like many here have done a good job refuting their lines by showing the thermal levels are lower and that the new radio systems are no more powerful or different in frequencies than decades old ones. So how do you explain how they are causing new problems? How do you explain that they are causing problems even at very very low power? This was all they had left to try to make up.
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September 2nd, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Well I agree that the idea that information in radio waves being a problem is really dumb and basically impossible. However, I am not willing to consider that cell phones and radio waves don’t cause cancer. I’m not sure on this, but it seems like every week a new study is reported linking it to cancer. I have heard studies that say no link as well. All the reports I see though, nobody has ever said it is surely safe. If it were so simple and no evidence existed why was it not resolved long ago?
All I can see is that there is some information always coming out to make it seem like it is likely responsible for cancer increases. I am not an expert, but this is what many seem to indicate and they can’t all be wrong, can they? I use a cell phone. I use wifi and I don’t fear the towers or anything. However, I am not a huge user and I am sure there are other things in life that are more likely to kill me.
I’m just saying when it comes to this, it seems a reasonable concern. if it wasn’t then the debate would have ended and we wouldn’t see so many questioning it and constant conflicting studies.
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September 2nd, 2009 at 6:47 pm
Jake H said:
Jake the problem is that the number of people using cellphone is now so large that it swamps any attempt to use correlation in any meaningful way. It is the same as saying drinking tap water causes cancer because almost everyone that got cancer drank tap water. In cases like this one has to establish a mechanism – a smoking gun, as it were – and there has been no, none, zilch of this sort of evidence.
Unfortunately there is enough interest in this that the popular press can sell more papers and magazines by reporting on it, and there are unscrupulous researchers who will feed them results, no mater how poor, to publish.
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September 2nd, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Exactly.
It’s same old story with “Power Lines Cause Cancer”. It’s NON-ionizing radiation, and other than thermal effects, it’s biological effects are benign.
I’ve been around high-powered radio equipment since I was 10 years old, and I’m just fine, 48 years later.
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September 3rd, 2009 at 1:43 am
DV82XL said:
I don’t know about that. Perhaps you could make that case that now there are too many people using cell phones, but there are studies that looked at people who were early adopters like real estate agents who used them since the early 1980’s versus those who are in similar demographics but didn’t start until the late 1990’s. Some of these studies were done a few years ago when it was easier to find non-users. There have also been studies that worked from the other end: looking at cancer incidence and seeing if they could detect a higher use of cell phone or wifi technology.
There have been studies of those who live near transmitters versus those who didn’t. There have been studies on individuals who live in areas of very poor coverage and thus would be less prone to use wireless phones versus those in areas that are similar but with better coverage. Studies based on cumulative minutes spent per month, based on bills. Also, studies applied to wifi and so on.
Even before cell phones became common, there were some major studies done way back in the 1970’s on police officers who used radar guns for catching speeders on a regular basis to see if there were problems. Of course, this all goes back to Bell Labs studies on UHF and microwaves in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
Plus, there are plenty of animal studies and in vitro tissue studies. Those are comparatively easy to isolate and control.
Yes, at this point it is common enough to make isolation and control grouping difficult. There have been some big and very careful studies to try to do this though.
One, I think in Sweeden, looked at hundreds of thousands of individuals over the course of 20+ years. If I am correct, this study stands as the largest single complete case examination study in the history of epidemiology. Even by national standards, it is a HUGE study that cost many millions to tabulate and audit.
The fact that no solid evidence has been found on anything leaves me thinking that there either is no risk at all or the risk is so minuscule that it is impossible to detect, even by the most concerted and rigorous attempts.
Such enormous effort has gone into this: hundreds of thousands of cases studied, extreme efforts at analysis, repeated control studies, multiple methodologies tried. I just can’t fathom that we wouldn’t have found something if there was anything to it.
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September 3rd, 2009 at 2:04 am
Didn’t I read recently that the Creation Museum was bankrupt? These guys at the “Bioinitiative” Group should team up with the Creationists and start a Museum of Silly Science.
We all know that too much information can rot your brain. Now we know why.
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September 3rd, 2009 at 2:36 am
drbuzz0 said:
My remarks were made in reference to Jake H being concerned that there were fresh studies coming out all the time showing correlation. The ones being done now that attempt to show a simple relationship are valueless because of the swamping effect. They are also valueless for any number of other reasons because of shoddy workmanship both in design and execution, and I have several times gone through the tiresome chore of dismantling several examples to demonstrate why this is so.
But in general the fact that we swim in a sea of low level electromagnetic radiation almost constantly (modulated or not) makes any correlated study dead out of the gate without an underlying and detectable secondary effector.
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September 3rd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
DV82XL said:
No, we certainly can’t ever get away from electromagnetic radiation completely. ANything that is above absolute zero will radiate some energy, so even if you blocked out all external radiation then you still have some that is there.
What we can say is that those who are exposed to levels that are higher than background due to artificial sources like communications show no ill effects, so matter how hard we try to detect them. We can also demonstrate that at a certain level there is harm from heating and rf burns, but that as soon as you drop bellow the level of thermal damage then there is no problem detected.
We can put a rat in a cage with a transmitter that is comparable to a cell phone or wifi device and it will live its whole life there showing no ill effect compared to one that is isolated from artificial signals.
If it comes to ‘unnatural’ signals we can also look at people who live for a long time near a cell tower versus those who don’t. This can prove that there is or is not a coloration to anything. This is not a surprise because we would predice with the isotropic model that exposure would be very low.
Thus, the claims that the tower is dangerous are bunk twice over – both empirical and theoretical approaches prove otherwise.
If you have a phone to your head, then it is true that the power density your head is exposed to is greater than that you get in the normal enviornment. Does this higher power density correlate to any harm? All indicators are no.
People just throw confusing tactics into this or try to make it an issue of “certainty” when in fact we are about as certain as modern science can provide wiht anything. If they raise the bar high enough then even a tiny amount of doubt becomes enough to justify ridiculous claims.
With these studies you compound them and your level of error and thus doubt gets smaller and smaller and smaller, but if you use enough precision then technically it is never zero. It gets to the point where you can assume for all practical purpose it is zero, but if you use a high enough bar and carry out enough zeros then you can never be satisfied.
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September 3rd, 2009 at 5:00 pm
What I was trying to illustrate is that the so-call studies that try and show that there is an effect are useless BECAUSE simple correlation yields no useful results. Yet if you look at all of the ones that have been done in the past two years this is the only ‘evidence’ that they proffer.
What I was trying to do is show that this is a useless metric due to the fact that any result of that sort is going to suffer from statistical swamping. I believe that this line of argument is useful because it is easy to explain and accessible to a large number of folks that might not have the background to assimilate a more detailed explanation.
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September 4th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
These people should be more afraid (if not terrified) of a proven source of dangerous electromagnetic radiation – the sun. This is especially true since this video appears to be Australian and I believe we have the highest rates of skin cancer in the world.
If they put half as much effort into raising awareness of skin cancer then they might actually be saving some lives. But I suppose theres no ‘conspiracy factor’ to something that has already been proven dangerous and hence is less appealing to them.
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September 5th, 2009 at 3:25 am
Well I am sorry to see this video end up being insulted on sucha close minded site. There are other videos out there to and this is something we nedd to think more about especially as kids are getting exposed and that can cause cancer way later in life. We don’t know the long term risks. It is about time people raised the red flag and asked for some sanity.
I don’t worry too much about the phones or the wifi stuff, because that is obviously small and not going to cuase much harm, but the towers are to me a lot like smoke stacks that spray invisible electrosmog. Towers are the big danger. Never live near one for your own safety. They can danger whole areas of a town. So i say the phones are probably ok, especially if you have a wave scrambling sticker or badge to face your ear. The towers should be illegal in cities and towns. I know we need them for the phones to work, but they need to be in areas away from people and surely away from schools and homes. they should be isolated.
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September 5th, 2009 at 10:26 am
“Well I am sorry to see this video end up being insulted on sucha close minded site.”
I’m sorry you let flim-flam artists use your open skull like a public lavatory.
“There are other videos out there to and this is something we nedd to think more about especially as kids are getting exposed and that can cause cancer way later in life.”
The effects of EM radiation from all over the spectrum has been studied in excruciating detail since world war II. It doesn’t do a damned thing but heat flesh; you have sweat glands and a circulatory system, there’s no problem cooling off a few watts.
“I don’t worry too much about the phones or the wifi stuff, because that is obviously small and not going to cuase much harm[...]“
Inverse square law. It obviously causes a far greater exposure than cell towers.
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September 5th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Information dangerous?… OMG, I’ve got hundreds if not thousands of books on my shelves… gotta burn ‘em all… Too late! I’m dying already… aarghh!
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September 6th, 2009 at 1:30 am
JC88 said:
This has to be one of the regular, sane, readers pretending to be so… what is the word I’m looking for? I wont say it, just incase this person is for real.
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September 6th, 2009 at 1:56 am
The Monster from Polaris said:
Bah. Books? Books don’t contain that much information. Thousands of books will only be a few gigabytes at the very most. I suppose if they all had lots of very high quality illustrations and photos in them, then that might be a descent amount of information.
A few blu-rays on the other hand: that’ll kill you. Me, I’ve got a couple of multi-terabyte raids and a whole case of DVD’s so I should be dead by now.
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
Carl Sagan
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September 6th, 2009 at 3:09 am
This panic has gotten so bad, I’m just hoping it will eventually boil over and end up getting a backlash it deserves. The insanity of it all, especially from those who don’t know the first thing and think that schools should have things like “radiation scrambler chips” next to the computers. If this doesn’t end, I think I’ll go insane with frustration.
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September 6th, 2009 at 7:44 am
The Curtains said:
Seems to me like the pot calling the kettle black to have a tv report that cell phone radiation is killing everyone. These stations will go on the air with their big multi-kilowatt transmitters and proclaim that cell towers are killing everyone? I’m not sure which would cause the greater exposure given the inverse square law and all, but still, the fact of the matter is that they’re doing the same damn thing, if you believe that garbage.
Oh wait.. it’s not about power level, it’s “information.” So maybe television information is okay? Jesus Christ, the stupid burns.
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September 20th, 2009 at 2:53 am
I’m not as much of an expert on these matters as some here might be, but still, the information? Pardon my French, but what kind of dip**** would believe that? It’s beyond idiotic. Grasping for straws, in all likelihood. They probably want to sell some kind of magic trinket to protect you from it too, right?
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April 20th, 2010 at 8:49 pm
[...] special interest groups like “Bioiniative” and assclowns like George Carlo and Leonard Hardell are not reliable sources. Any source [...]
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