> The issues are wattage and whether the radiation is ionizing or not
As an EE-type guy the issue is actually the dose rate. Even if the effects were sub-linear, which it seems they probably are not (like, why would they be?), there is an incredible range in dosage from FCC permitted rates up to "those crazy broadcast engineers and ham radio operators doing questionable things".
If effects were proportionate to dose rates, then my broadcast engineer bros would keel over dead at work the first five minutes of employment, etc. Maybe not THAT bad, but pretty bad. If carrying around 0.6 watts peak increased cancer rates by 1 ppm, you can imagine what would happen to EEs working on MW class military radars, MW class broadcast transmitters, they would essentially all die of cancer before retirement. But they don't. So you can put a firm estimate on the death rate from cell phone radiation at "less than 10 people a year" because if more than 10 people a year died of cellphones then essentially all communications industry personnel would die very young; and they don't; so it seems likely to be many orders of magnitude less than 10 people per year, but it certainly can't be more.
Another way to look at it is there's a 50 KW broadcast farm near the interstate where I live; if a 0.6 watt phone increased the risk of cancer, then driving by 100000 times the power would realistically result in every car driver breaking out in tumors and dying the first time they drive past the antenna; yet no signal appears in the statistics, so it seems very unlikely a 0.6 watt transmitter could be killing people if something a hundred thousand times worse is definitely not killing anyone.
> A court-ordered study has found that electromagnetic waves beamed by Vatican Radio leave residents living near the station's antennas at a higher risk of cancer, Italian media said
* For adult men 8-10 km away, the radio station reduced cancer cases by 75%! Hooray!
* It had slight benefits for the same group at 4-8 km
* It caused a couple of extra cases at 0-4 km
But then you realize we're talking about drawing conclusions from an n=40 study... That's just not enough to draw meaningful conclusions. And for children, it was n=8 !!!!!
> you can imagine what would happen to EEs working on MW class military radars, MW class broadcast transmitters,
They're not getting exposed to MW level field strengths, or else they would be literally cooked.
The amount of power you get from a 0.6W phone in your pocket is dramatically higher than your exposure from the 50KW broadcast due to the inverse square law.
An isotropic radiator at 300m distance with 50kw power results in a field strength of 0.04421 w/m^2, while a 0.6w isotropic emitter at 3cm results in 53.0504 w/m^2. About 1200x higher. And unless you work at the transmitter you're not going to be within 300m of it most likely (there are fences set by exposure limits!), even if you work around it you're not going to be around it long while the phone is near you 12 hours a day, nearer than my 3cm example too. Though to be fair it's not putting out 0.6w all the time (though its maximum is also a lot higher than 0.6w for a normal phone, try more like 3w).
(the station is also not isotropic, but depending on the type of station the radiation pattern probably lowers exposure near the station-- no point in illuminating the ground!)
I'm mostly correcting your justification, the fact that we have limited evidence of problems from high power (except due to heating) is a good argument that lower levels of exposure are not likely an issue, but exposure levels from a running phone in your pocket are higher than you might expect simply because how close it is to you.
And when it comes to weak long term effects like cancer rates, it might actually be hard to tell for sure particularly since we lack any natural control group. Anyone different enough to NOT have a cellphone is different enough to make their cancer rates incomparable.
As an EE-type guy the issue is actually the dose rate. Even if the effects were sub-linear, which it seems they probably are not (like, why would they be?), there is an incredible range in dosage from FCC permitted rates up to "those crazy broadcast engineers and ham radio operators doing questionable things".
If effects were proportionate to dose rates, then my broadcast engineer bros would keel over dead at work the first five minutes of employment, etc. Maybe not THAT bad, but pretty bad. If carrying around 0.6 watts peak increased cancer rates by 1 ppm, you can imagine what would happen to EEs working on MW class military radars, MW class broadcast transmitters, they would essentially all die of cancer before retirement. But they don't. So you can put a firm estimate on the death rate from cell phone radiation at "less than 10 people a year" because if more than 10 people a year died of cellphones then essentially all communications industry personnel would die very young; and they don't; so it seems likely to be many orders of magnitude less than 10 people per year, but it certainly can't be more.
Another way to look at it is there's a 50 KW broadcast farm near the interstate where I live; if a 0.6 watt phone increased the risk of cancer, then driving by 100000 times the power would realistically result in every car driver breaking out in tumors and dying the first time they drive past the antenna; yet no signal appears in the statistics, so it seems very unlikely a 0.6 watt transmitter could be killing people if something a hundred thousand times worse is definitely not killing anyone.