5G: The Trouble With the New Phone Network

did you know there are now more mobile devices in the world than people whether you knew this or not you probably did know that mobile phones work with the next best thing to Magic which is physics all that data flies through the air in the form of electromagnetic radiation and since video resolution will soon be high enough for you to check whether I've plucked my eyebrows wireless networks constantly have to be upgraded the fourth generation of wireless networks 4G for short is now being extended to 5G and 6G isn't planning but 5G interferes with the weather forecast and 6G brings more problems what's new about those wireless networks and what's the problem with them that's what we'll talk about today this video was sponsored by 80 000 hours you have about eighty thousand hours in your career 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year for 40 years that's a lot of time and it means that your career is probably your biggest opportunity to make a positive impact on the world eighty thousand 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Sabine it's all free link is in the info below and now let's talk about 5G the first four generations of wireless networks used frequency bands from 400 megahertz to roughly 2 gigahertz but there are limits to the amount of information you can transfer over a Channel with a limited bandwidth in fact there's Maths for this it's called the Shannon Hartley theorem if you want to transfer more information through a Channel with the fixed noise level you have to increase either the bandwidth or the power you can't increase the 4G bandwidth and there are safety limits on the power the 5G generation tries to circumvent the problem by using new bands at higher frequencies going up to about 50 gigahertz those frequencies correspond to wavelength in the millimeter range which is why they're called millimeter waves there's a reason they haven't previously been used for telecommunication and it's not because millimeter waves are also used as goodbyes for In-laws it's because radiation of the previously used frequencies passes through obstacles largely undisturbed unless maybe the obstacle is a mountain but millimeter waves can get blocked by trees or buildings which isn't great if you like calling people who aren't within line of sight can you pass me the soul please thank you so much so the idea of 5G is to collect the signals from nearby mobile phones in what's called a small cell of the network and pass them on at low power to a bigger antenna that sends them long distance at higher power the 5G Network Technology is currently being rolled out in most of the developed World Kisco escamates that by next year 10 of mobile connections will use 5G 5G is controversial because it's the first to use millimeter waves and the health effects have not been well studied I already talked about this in a previous video but let me be clear that I have no reason to think that 5G will have any adverse health effects to the extent that research exists it shows that millimeter waves will add high power warm-up tissue and that's pretty much it however the studies that have been done leave me wanting last year one of the nature journals published a review on 5G mobile networks and health they looked at 107 experimental start bodies that investigated various effects on living tissue including genotoxicity cell proliferation gene expression cell signaling Etc the brief summary is that none of those studies found anything of concern however this isn't the interesting part of the paper the interesting part is that the authors rated the quality of these 107 studies only two were rated well designed and only one got the maximum quality score one out of 107 the others all had significant shortcomings anything from lack of blinding to small sample sizes to poor control of environmental parameters in fact the author's conclusion is not that 5G is safe their conclusion is given the low quality methods of the majority of the experimental studies we infer that a systematic review of different bio effects is not possible at present now as I said there's no reason to think that 5G is harmful indeed that's good reason to think it's not because millimeter waves have been used in medicine for a long time and for all we know they only enter the upper skin layers but I am a little surprised that there aren't any good studies on the health effects of long-term radiation exposure in this frequency range the 5G network has been in the planning since 2008. that's 14 years that's longer than it takes NASA to fly to Pluto so scientists say there's nothing to worry well they also said that smoking is good for you and alcohol doesn't cross the placenta and that copies of you live in parallel universes as a scientist myself I can confirm that scientists say a lot when the day is long and I would much rather see data than just take word for it only good thing I have to tell you on the matter is that the World Health Organization is working on their own review about the health risk of 5G which is supposed to come out by December okay while we wait to hear what the who sells about the idea of irradiating much of the world population with millimeter waves let's talk about a known side effect effect of 5G it's a headache for atmospheric scientists that meteorologists but also climate scientists and yes that means 5G affects the weather forecast among the most important data that goes into weather and climate models is the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere this is measured from satellites this movie shows the average amount of water vapor in the column of atmosphere in a given month measured by NASA's aquasatellite accurate measurements of the atmospheric water content are essential for weather forecasts you measure the amount of water vapor by measuring electromagnetic radiation that is scattered by the water molecules in the atmosphere each molecule reacts to radiation in particular frequency ranges and that allows you to count how many of those molecules there are it's the same method that's used to detect phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus which we talked about in more detail in this earlier video The Frequency that satellite is used to look for water is you guessed it 23.80 gigahertz the issue is now that this water vapor signal is uncomfortably close to one of the 5G bands which covers the range from 24.25 to 27.5 gigahertz you might sell that still 400 megahertz away from the water vapor measurements and that's right but the 5G band doesn't abruptly stop at a particular frequency it's more that it tape us out the emission outside of the assigned band is called leakage that leakage creates noise and this noise is the problem you see the weather forecast today sensitively depends on data quality in recent decades the weather forecast has improved a lot in this figure you see how much more you can trust the weather forecast today than you could a few decades ago in 1980 a three-day forecast in the northern hemisphere was only correct about 85 percent of the time today it's correct more than 98 of the time and this isn't just about deciding whether to bring an umbrella it's relevant to warn people of dangerous weather events a 72-hour hurricane warning today is more accurate than a 24-hour warning was 40 years ago the reasons for this Improvement have been better computers better models but also weather satellites that collect more and better data and that brings us back to the water vapor signal and the 5G troubles the water vapor signal is weak and the Strong's contribution usually comes from low altitudes that's right typically the biggest fraction of water vapor in the atmosphere isn't in the clouds but close to the ground if you took all the water in the atmosphere and put it on the ground you'd get about 2.5 centimeters the clouds alone merely make a tenth of a millimeter those are average values and the details depend on the weather situation but in any case it means that the water vapor signal is very sensitive to Noise near the ground it's like trying to hear whisper in a noisy room to make matters worse most of the 5G noise will come from densely populated areas so we'll get the least accurate forecast where people actually live meteorologists are not happy this may partly be because they had to put away their crystal balls but the bigger reason is that in 2019 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric organization in the United States Noah for short did an internal study on the impacts of 5G in a federal hearing neo-jackops a former NOAA administrator said that the current 5G regulations would degrade the forecast skill by up to 30 percent uh this would degrade the forecast skill by up to 30 percent so if you look back in time to see when our forecast skill is roughly 30 percent less than it was today it's somewhere around 1980. this would result in the reduction of hurricane track forecast lead time by roughly two to three days the Secretary General of the word meteorological organization pateri Talus is also concerned he said potential effects of this could be felt across multiple impact areas including Aviation shipping agricultural meteorology and warning of extreme events as well as our common ability to monitor climate change in the future his organization calls for strict limits on the 5G leakage but well as they say there are two sides to every story on the other side is for example Brett Jill and Executive Vice President of the ctia that's a trade Association which represents the Wireless Communications industry in the United States he wrote a blog post for the ctia website claiming that the effect of 5G on the weather forecast is an absurd claim with no signs behind it he says the study done by NOAA used an obsolete sensor that's not in operation then epos the China card the Trump Administration has already made its call and at this time we get on the same page as China and our other Rivals most certainly are today that wasn't the end of the story the atmospheric scientist Jordan Gotham from the University of Wisconsin at medicine pointed out that the reason the NOAA study mentioned a sensor that isn't being used in satellites today is that this particular design was canceled it was however replaced by a very similar one so the argument is a red herring in response a different cdia guy wrote another blog post claiming that 5G traffic will be hundreds of megahertz away from the band used in weather data collection so he completely ignores the leakage problem and hopes his readers don't know any better on the other hand Noah didn't publish their study and that didn't win them any favors either however in 2020 researchers from Rutgers university did their own study they modeled the leakage of 5G into the water vapor signal and evaluated its impact on the weather forecast by using old data they did a mock 12-hour forecast one without 5G and then two with different levels of leakage power as you can see in these figures they found that the 5G leakage can affect the forecast up to 0.9 millimeter in precipitation and 1.3 degrees Celsius and temperature at 2 meters altitude and it's not just the value that changes but also the location that's a significant difference which would indeed degrade weather forecast accuracy noticeably maybe not as dramatic as the NOAA guy claimed but certainly of concern what has happened since in July 2021 the American government accountability office released a report in which they just said that the arguments about the impact of 5G on weather forecast were highly contentious despite the lack of consensus the official U.S position became to adopt fairly weak rules on the power leakage they were then adopted by the international telecommunications Union which is based in Geneva Switzerland and which writes the global rules but most countries in the European Union so far just haven't auctioned off the Troublesome frequency bounce maybe they are waiting to see how things pan out in the USA the guinea pig of countries and then there's 6G the sixth generation of wireless networks this is already being planned and it's supposed to use bands at even higher frequencies above 100 gigahertz and up into the terahertz range 6G is supposed to usher in the metaverse ERA with augmented and virtual reality and ultra high definition video so we can finally watch live streams of squirrel feeders from New Zealand on our contact lenses according to the tech side Live Wire 6G is just the natural progression towards faster and better Wireless connectivity ultimately whether it's worth 6G 7g or another G will have such incredibly fast speeds that no progress bars or wait times will be required for any normal amount of data at least at today's standards everything will just be available instantly and who would not like that but of course the 6G range 2 is being used by scientists for measurements that could be compromised for example NASA measures ozone around 236 gigahertz and carbon monoxide at about 330.5 gigahertz so we can pretty much expect to see the entire 5G discussion repeat for 6G how can the situation be resolved for 5G the World Meteorological organization is trying to negotiate limits with the regulating agencies in different countries they demand that cell towers operating close to other satellite frequencies should be limited to transmit at -55 decibel Watts for out-of-band emission so that's the leakage the European commission has agreed on -42 decibel Watts for 5G base stations the FCC in the US set a limit at -20 decibel watt this is a logarithmic scale so this is more than 30 orders of magnitude above the limit the meteorologists ask for what do we learn from this when a new technology is developed scientists usually get there first and when everyone else catches up they'll interfere with the scientists often metaphorically but sometimes literally this isn't a new story of course you only have to worry about noise from Railways if you have Railways and they are actually trains going on them but a high-tech Society also relies on the accuracy of data so this is a difficult trade-off there are no easy ways to decide what to do but I think everyone would be better off if the worries from scientists were taken more seriously in the design stage and not grumpingly acknowledged half through a global rollout if you like science without the gobbledygook you can support us on patreon or right here on YouTube by clicking on the join button below special thanks to our patreon supporters especially those of you in tier 4 and higher this channel would not be possible without your help we now also have a gift store with t-shirts and mugs and stuff go check it out every little bit helps thanks for watching see you next week

Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 407,511

Keywords: 5g, 5th generation wireless technology, 5th generation wifi, phone network, weather forecast problem, 5g health risks, 5g health risks 2022, wireless network, 5g wireless technology, 6g, 6g technology, the problem with 5g, the trouble with 5g, is 5g dangerous, hossenfelder, science without the gobbledygook, 5g network, what is 5g, 5g technology

Id: UOvAZPHDogs

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 03 2022