It's non ionizing (aka it doesn't have enough energy to instantly destroy cells unlike uv radiation) but it can heat up tissue, which is linked to cancer and worse (think microwave ovens).
No Idea why phones come with a SAR rating then and why there are safe limits defined, when no one found unsafe limits.
I don't see why microwave heating wouldn't cause the same effect.
Even from transmitting heat to the phone's components itself or other items that are nearby, e.g. laptops: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5219578/.
In the wavie scene (people who are paranoid about radio waves controlling them) shielding those devices is a typical approach — this is also where the meme of the tinfoil hat comes from. Ironically that shielding makes your cellphone operate with the maximum transmission power at all times.
A few unlucky people have been literally cooked to death by military radar. It's as awful as it sounds.
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/questions/why-do...
Well to me it sounds like you'd get heat stroke and pass out before anything reaches particularly painful temperatures, because it's heating you pretty evenly and not via contact, but maybe that's not the right way to think about it?
At higher frequencies I would guess it gets closer to normal burning?
Once tissue heating has occurred what happens next is well described by the bioheat equation, which is basically the thermal diffusion equation with a massive percussion term. The blood supply is very different to different tissue types and the depth at which peak heating occurs is a very strong function of wavelength.
For frequencies, the combination of these effects means that your eyes are most at risk -- water like and terrible blood supply. This gives rise to the first piece of advice I was given when a graduate student playing with electron paramagnetic resonance -- never look down a waveguide and treat them like a loaded gun!
My microwave oven disagrees