On the one hand, I think your conclusion is correct, but on the other hand, it took quite some time to establish the health risks of smoking. Because there were concerted disinformation campaigns etc.
It's not like smoking is subtle. Just ask any none smoker, or how people started with their first cigarette. Coughing, dry throat, WTF is happening, I've smoke in my lungs.
None of the characteristics you mention are actually related to cancer though. If we banned everything that caused dry throat or caused you to caught because “obviously they cause cancer”, where would we be today?
I mean we could ban 80% of all Indian food because first time westerners eat it they react much stronger to the spicy ness than they would to smoking.
Stating independent of the actual science that “It was always obvious that smoking caused cancer” isn’t any better than the people stating now that “obviously EM radiation causes cancer”.
I never claimed they cause cancer. They are just not the fun harmless looking fun that the cool Marlboro man makes it look like. At least not the first few times.
That is true. However we had multiple areas in the world where we could watch the mobile market basically explode within a short amount of time, there are people using phones for hours daily across time spans upwards of a decade and yet so far I haven't heard of any health statistic correlating with this trend.
Whereas with smoking we can see over ten times higher risks for certain types of cancer-related deaths. That doesn't mean there's no effect due to mobile phones, but I think if it were remotely comparable to smoking we'd see a significant impact by now.
The trouble is, there's lots of evidence, and also lots of evidence that it isn't. The only way to draw a conclusion is by making a judgement about which evidence is better: which scientific experiments are better designed?
You can also analyze the plausibility of the arguments. Cell phones do not produce ionizing radiation.
This is similar to homeopathy. Even if the state of research is not great, we're discussing a theory that is just not physically plausible. The default assumption should be that it is wrong.
