cell phones are microwave ovens
my stepfather is retired navy. he has told me a few interesting stories about his time there, like when the helicoptor he was in slid off the flight deck of a helicopter carrier into the sea. obviously, he made it, but it was a close call. almost sunk to the bottom of the ocean, strapped in to that helicopter.
he had another story that i found fascinating. i am not sure how the navy implements communication between ships currently, but when he was in the navy they used microwave radiation. apparently the technicians, when there were problems with ship-to-ship communication would check to see if the microwave transmitters were working simply by sticking their hand in front of the transmitter. if their hand became heated, it was working, if not, there was a problem.
cell phones use microwave radiation to function. a cell phone, a cell phone tower and a microwave oven are all transmitters of microwave radiation. a cell phone by itself transmits a small amount of microwave radiation, but cell phones and the towers they depend on are ubiquitous. there are few places one can be and not get a signal for their phone. i see people getting calls on the l train, underneath the east river. it takes a pretty serious amount of radiation to push a signal through solid bedrock and a hundred feet of water.
so i was recently adding these things up, when i came up with, what i thought was a ridiculous theory. cell phones are contributing to global warming. i dismissed the idea as nonsense, but thinking further, thought that it is entirely possible. a microwave oven concentrates it's radiation into a compact space. it's easy to confirm that your amy's frozen dinner is getting warm in the microwave, where a large amount of radiation is directed into a fixed space in it's shell. but with cell phones and towers, where the radiation isn't directed into a fixed space, but dispersed in such a way so as to cover as much area as possible, recording the amount of heat produced by either component would be a difficult task. cell towers exist out of doors, in the open environment, with all it's climates and micro-climates, constantly changing from one second to the next.
thinking logically, if there were enough cell phones and towers, the radiation transmitted from these elements could indeed heat objects that are exposed to the microwaves. buildings, pavement, trees, water, you, me, etc.. upon the dissipation of said heat, the air would become warmer - making other objects warmer and repeating the cycle. cell phones could contribute to warming on a globally localized scale. there would be no warming associated with them in places where they do no exist, such as oceans, but the land masses could see a rise in temperatures. in cities like new york, where there is so much "interference" - objects which absorb the microwave radiation before it arrives at it's destination - your phone, cell phone towers are more numerous than places in the suburbs and rural areas and the potential for warming is higher. the transmitters in non-urban are much larger and more powerful than the ones in the city, as there is less "interference."
this theory would be consistent with another theory of mine - everything humans do is detrimental to the environment that all creatures share.
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