cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/7625705
According to the linked article, 72 studies suggest that wi-fi radiation harms/kills #bees – and by some claims is a threat to their continued existence. I suppose if extinction were really a likely risk there would be widespread outrage and bee conservationists taking actions. It seems there is a lack of chatter about this. This thread also somewhat implies disinterest in even having wi-fi alternatives.
In any case, does anyone think this is a battle worth fighting? Some possible off-the-cuff actions that come to mind:
- ban the sale of wi-fi devices bigger than a phone in Europe¹ if they do not also comply with these conditions:
- include an ethernet port as well. So e.g. macbooks would either have to bring back the ethernet port or nix wi-fi (and obviously Apple wouldn’t nix Wi-Fi).
- have a physical wi-fi toggle switch on the chassis (like Thinkpads have)
- force public libraries with Wi-Fi to give an ethernet port option so library users at least have the option of turning off their own wi-fi emissions.
- ban the sale of Wi-Fi APs that do not have:
- a configurable variable power setting that is easily tunable by the user; maybe even require a knob or slider on the chassis.
- bluetooth that is internet-capable
- force phones that include wi-fi to also include bluetooth as well as the programming to use bluetooth for internet. Bluetooth routers have existed for over a decade but they are quite rare… cannot be found in a common electronics shop.
Regarding bluetooth, it is much slower than wi-fi, lower range, and probably harder to secure. But nonetheless people should have this option for situations where they don’t need wi-fi capability. E.g. when a phone is just sitting idle it could turn off wi-fi and listen over bluetooth for notifications.
I suspect the 1st part of this quote from the article explains the lack of concern:
“The subject is uncomfortable for many of us because it interferes with our daily habits and there are powerful economic interests behind mobile communication technology.”
- I say /Europe/ because it’s perhaps the only place where enough people would be concerned and where you also have the greatest chance of passing pro-humanity legislation (no “Citizens United” that human needs have to compete with).
You want a cool argument? There is no plausible mechanism through which the amount of electromagnetic waves wifi uses can harm bees. Ionizing radiation harms cells by breaking chemical bonds that are part of important molecules like DNA or to a lesser extent, proteins. Wifi makes use of a form of electromagnetic waves that are on the order of a million times less energetic than visible light is and about 10 million times less energetic than the lowest energy ionizing electromagnetic waves. You’re not going to harm bees if theres a wifi router pumping out 10 watts of microwaves 100 meters from a hive. If you are going to claim that wifi is harmful to bees, you need to show that there is a plausible mechanism to do so. Not just rely on most people not understanding why ionizing radiation is dangerous.
It’s sounds as if you’re assuming the radiation is claimed to do cellular harm. What I’ve heard is that the radiation harms bees’ ability to navigate by interfering with their signalling. Imagine having a PA system turned up so loud in your office you cannot hear yourself think, in which case you would be less functional. I don’t recall the particulars but it’s something that causes them to get lost or lose track of where the nectar is. Like postal workers, bees develop a regular route where they pickup nectar. It’s not cellular harm but more like constantly rattling their sensitive antennas in a way that disrupts their tasks.
BTW, a roughly similar thing is happening in the ocean as well. Some sea creatures (orcas iirc) use echolocation and also communication. Humans are disrupting that by making lots of noise that carries on sufficiently far under water in sufficiently similar frequencies to cause a disruption.
There is zero credible evidence that bee communication has anything at all to do with radio waves. This all seems like people looking for a reason to demonize anything people create. Id rather people focus on human activity that actually does harm the environment like fossil fuels, waste dumping, roads cutting off migratory routes, encroachment on native habitat, slash and burn agriculture, dosing cattle with subclinical levels of antibiotics, sea floor dredging anything that is a real threat not an imagined one.
The bias evident in your 1st sentence above is causing you to ignore the irrefutable drop in bee populations, which is not imaginary.
You are looking at a listing of tons of scientific papers reporting notable correlations on this. Scientific papers are the most credible way for recording evidence that humanity has developed. Just how much more credible do you want your evidence to be?
I also thought, non-ionizing radiation was likely fine, up until this point. But it does not surprise me that pretty much just dumping energy into an open room would have effects beyond WiFi reception.
Again, there is no plausible mechanism. Just like there was no plausible mechanism for LK-99 to be the fantastical superconductor it was claimed to be. If someone claims something in science, they need to back it up with evidence and a solid mechanism. You CANNOT just claim things without something solid to back it in science.
I can’t help but wonder whether you believe smoking causes lung cancer. The evidence we have in that case is purely statistical correlation. That’s it. The stats are overwhelmingly substantial but there is no solid evidence of the mechanical nuts & bolts at a cellular level that ties smoking to lung cancer. So do you simply ignore the stats in that case and continue smoking and leave the tobacco industry off-leash until mechanical evidence surfaces?
That smoking causes cancer is not purely statistical correlation. This article gives a good overview and is aimed at a general audience. It has a section acknowledging that we do not yet have all of details nailed down, but my reading of that is that it’s more about “how exactly do carcinogens work” rather than leaving us with only a pure statistical correlation.
It’s also worth noting that, as powerful as statistics can be, most of the best science uses initial statistical correlation as a clue that there is something worth investigating, not as an end in itself. Sometimes, of course, statistics is all there is, which is why so many things have to be investigated using many carefully designed, carefully controlled trials. When the people publishing these papers start proposing and investigating mechanisms or designing and conducting such trials, they will get much more positive attention from the scientific community.
In the absence of that, my bet is that there is some combination of ulterior motives, misunderstandings, and unaccounted confounding factors.
Your paywalled article was unreachable to me but to go off your comment, not having the answer on how carcinogens work is sufficient for missing the mechanical proof that xkforce requires as a precondition to not regarding research as “garbage”. Hence my question, which was directed at xkforce and which still stands b/c the nuts and bolts of carcinogens remains unexplained.
Cancer was an example of a case where we have a 10,000 foot view of evidence but not at the cellular view. Attacking the example just muddies the waters; it does not actually counter the idea of taking precursory superficial evidence seriously.
Of course, but investigation takes time. If you wait until there is an xkforce-approved mechanical cause-to-result finding, you have hundreds of thousands of smoker deaths in the meantime before acting. As the bee population shrinks, what is the harm of using the low-emission tech that already exists in parallel to the research on what’s happening at a cellular level?
Notice that none of the actions I proposed would actually block the use of wi-fi but merely push for people to have useful alternative options. At a stage where the research reaches an xkforce-approved mechanical cause-to-result finding I would be proposing prohibitions.
NABU is a nature protection non-profit. What would the ulterior motive be? If the research is bogus then the compromise of their integrity and credibility works against them.
Too bad about the paywall. I did a web search, picked a few likely looking sites, and linked what I thought was the best one.
Your rebuttal seems sound on the face of it.
I would point out that people and organizations commonly promote things that seem like they should be counterproductive.
But why not? There’s tons of examples of non-ionic radiation having potentially destructive influences.
There’s multiple that require a high intensity, which one could argue might not be the case here: lasers, flashbang grenades, infrared heaters, microwave ovens
“High” is relative, so that is still a difficult argument to make.
But there’s also examples with a lower intensity.
If any metals are in the way of EMFs, those will pick up significantly more energy.
But the simplest example is just holding a flashlight into your eyes. We likely wouldn’t know, if certain insects actually see microwaves and we could just be blinding them or feeding them strange information with our routers.
These studies are initial recordings of correlations. Of course, we won’t have secured yet, what the actual, concrete causation mechanism is. We should still be incredibly mindful, because pollinators are already doing terribly.
We know enough about insect physiology, especially bees, that it is staggeringly unlikely that bees sense microwaves at the levels they would typically be exposed to. Articles like what the op linked to that make no attempt to vett anything, no attempt to find alternate explanations etc. are considered garbage within any scientific field. A good paper/article explores alternative explanations. A bad paper jumps to the desired conclusion and stops asking questions like this one did. Doing what this article did (or did not do), is a recipe for being lied to.
I agree. But I hope by “explanations” you do not mean off-the-cuff anecdotal speculation. If you can find a credible research that was overlooked by the compilation of 72 other studies, please cite the research.
It’s absurd to suggest that a study of existing studies necessarily involve a new field study. And foolish to disregard existing scientific findings as “garbage” on the purely speculative basis that alternative hypothesis was not sought out. This is why peer reviews exist. One research effort by a few people cannot be expected have total information awareness and access to all proprietary/protected journals and impeccable ability to search all journals at hand.
How do you know? You’re putting your own guesswork about their efforts ahead of what is actually evident. This is extremely unscientific.
No what youve posted is extremely unscientific. You cant do what these people have done and call it science. There needs to be a nonzero amount of rigor and there really isnt any here. It gets dismissed out of hand until there is substance to it beyond a very obvious agenda.
1 good paper is worth more than an infinite number of bad ones.