Sunday, March 09, 2008 . 3/09/2008
From Ask Bill Nye:
Why do we have daylight saving time?
First of all, it's the law. We in the United States, and in almost every industrialized country, advance our clocks one hour in the spring. (Actually, as of 2007, we in the U.S. get a jump on daylight saving time before winter is officially over. But "winter ahead, fall back" just doesn't have the same ring to it.) Technically, the big "spring ahead" happens at 2 a.m. on a Sunday. But most people adjust their clocks before bed on Saturday night. Then, we leave 'em that way all summer. In Europe, it's called "Summer Time," but in the U.S. it's "daylight saving time." In autumn, we return to standard time by setting our clocks back an hour -- the "fall back."
Along with the semiannual confusion, there is controversy around daylight saving time. Some people think it saves energy and thereby, perhaps, helps average Americans save money. The argument here is that we keep our lights off more when the Sun is still up later in the day.
Other people assert that we actually use more energy than we would without daylight saving time, because we drive around and shop more while the Sun shines. These are apparently both real effects: Less electricity is used with more daylight available, but more energy is consumed as automobile usage increases.
So far, studies agree that traffic accidents go down a tad during daylight saving time, but it's not clear how much.
Legislating daylight
A Department of Energy study about our energy use, commissioned in 2005, is still being ... er ... studied. Regardless, the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 declares that we continue to observe daylight saving time indefinitely. It even changed the start and end dates to give us four more weeks of DST. Since March 2007, DST begins each year on the second Sunday in March, and ends the first Sunday in November. (It used to start the first Sunday in April, and end the last Sunday in October.)
Many argue that daylight saving time (not "savings time") just causes more confusion than it's worth. Everyone agrees that there is a loss of efficiency whenever the time changes. At world stock markets, for example, one estimate claims that $31 billion leaks away in the confusion every year. Airline schedules are just a pain in the neck when the clocks are messed with. The actual time it takes to get from one place to another stays the same, still it's easy to end up being late (or early) if you forget to change your clock along with the rest of the world. But with all this, we've stuck with daylight saving for about a century.
Ben Franklin's Joke
Writer, inventor and American founding father Ben Franklin is often credited (or blamed) for starting daylight saving time. He apparently joked that the people of Paris should be home and in bed as soon as the sun set because horse-drawn coaches -- taxis -- should be banned from the streets at night. He took his facetiousness further by saying the citizens of the City of Lights should be awakened every morning by a blast of cannon fire, and that anyone shuttering their windows from sunrise would be taxed.
Franklin was writing with his well-known dry wit. He loved Paris and traveled there frequently. But somehow, his suggestions about going to bed early and rising early planted the notion that he was behind this whole business of changing our clocks to match the sunrise and sunset.
In reality, Englishman William Willett, an avid outdoorsman, gets the credit for all this clock adjusting. The Victorian-era builder and pamphleteer felt that people were missing the best part of every summer day and argued strongly for daylight saving. One of the primary points of his argument was that adjusting our clocks would save money and resources since people would be using artificial lights less if they were up and working when the Sun was up.
Minority report
His idea was not popular, but Britain tried it out in 1916, in an effort to save money during World War I. Willett had died the previous year, so he was not around to see the various trial-and-error attempts at making his proposal work. Appropriately enough, the memorial sundial dedicated to Willet is always on Summer Time.
This is where I'd like us all to start thinking about the problem -- the value and reasoning behind daylight saving time. For starters, keep in mind that this is a minority idea worldwide. Most people on Earth don't use it.
After all, about half the people on Earth have never even used a telephone! It's a developed-world idea. People in parts of the world without clocks get up with the Sun and reckon midday by the moment the Sun is highest in the sky. Why don't we all just do that?
Any way you slice it ...
If we divided the day into "halves" based on daylight and darkness, winter "hours" would be much shorter than summer hours. You can note this well for yourself by comparing a stopwatch or an oven timer, say, to a sundial.
In planetary science, "solar noon" is the moment when the Sun is highest in the sky. But during solar noon the Sun is not straight overhead in North America -- it's actually well to the south. In South America, it's to the north. And, since not everyone starts daylight saving time/Summer Time reckoning at the same time, there are one-, two- or three-hour differences between north and south twice a year. Phew.
But, if you're going to pick a time to start counting, solar noon is a pretty good one. We humans have gone on to divide the year, Earth's orbit of the Sun, into an equal number of seconds: 31,557,600.
By so doing, the clock's noon hardly ever lines up with the Sun's noon. We have come to like it this way. We can make our trains, planes and computer games all work together, coming and going to places north, south, east and west, to altitudes high and low, in the fourth dimension -- in time.
So is daylight saving worth holding on to? For my part, I like it. I love being outside all summer, often missing some good television and not having time for it, even if I record it. But, others must find it a messy inconvenience.
Arizona and Hawaii, sunny places, don't bother. In Alaska, certain citizens' groups want to discontinue it. Why don't we all just get up earlier in the summer and enjoy what Willett called the best part of the day? Apparently, there is something about our mathematical nature that finds daylight saving time appealing.
We've grown so accustomed to our precise arithmetic dividing the year into seconds -- even if we think of the year in larger increments -- that we prefer it to straight-up astronomical reckoning or the Sun's path in the sky.
We'll see how that Dept. of Energy study comes out, but I've got a feeling we all just like moving our clocks ahead, because we can sleep to the same part of the Sun's day, but get up when our clock reads what we feel is a civilized time.
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Along with the semiannual confusion, there is controversy around daylight saving time. Some people think it saves energy and thereby, perhaps, helps average Americans save money. The argument here is that we keep our lights off more when the Sun is still up later in the day.
Other people assert that we actually use more energy than we would without daylight saving time, because we drive around and shop more while the Sun shines. These are apparently both real effects: Less electricity is used with more daylight available, but more energy is consumed as automobile usage increases.
So far, studies agree that traffic accidents go down a tad during daylight saving time, but it's not clear how much.
Legislating daylight
A Department of Energy study about our energy use, commissioned in 2005, is still being ... er ... studied. Regardless, the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 declares that we continue to observe daylight saving time indefinitely. It even changed the start and end dates to give us four more weeks of DST. Since March 2007, DST begins each year on the second Sunday in March, and ends the first Sunday in November. (It used to start the first Sunday in April, and end the last Sunday in October.)
Many argue that daylight saving time (not "savings time") just causes more confusion than it's worth. Everyone agrees that there is a loss of efficiency whenever the time changes. At world stock markets, for example, one estimate claims that $31 billion leaks away in the confusion every year. Airline schedules are just a pain in the neck when the clocks are messed with. The actual time it takes to get from one place to another stays the same, still it's easy to end up being late (or early) if you forget to change your clock along with the rest of the world. But with all this, we've stuck with daylight saving for about a century.
Ben Franklin's Joke
Writer, inventor and American founding father Ben Franklin is often credited (or blamed) for starting daylight saving time. He apparently joked that the people of Paris should be home and in bed as soon as the sun set because horse-drawn coaches -- taxis -- should be banned from the streets at night. He took his facetiousness further by saying the citizens of the City of Lights should be awakened every morning by a blast of cannon fire, and that anyone shuttering their windows from sunrise would be taxed.
Franklin was writing with his well-known dry wit. He loved Paris and traveled there frequently. But somehow, his suggestions about going to bed early and rising early planted the notion that he was behind this whole business of changing our clocks to match the sunrise and sunset.
In reality, Englishman William Willett, an avid outdoorsman, gets the credit for all this clock adjusting. The Victorian-era builder and pamphleteer felt that people were missing the best part of every summer day and argued strongly for daylight saving. One of the primary points of his argument was that adjusting our clocks would save money and resources since people would be using artificial lights less if they were up and working when the Sun was up.
Minority report
His idea was not popular, but Britain tried it out in 1916, in an effort to save money during World War I. Willett had died the previous year, so he was not around to see the various trial-and-error attempts at making his proposal work. Appropriately enough, the memorial sundial dedicated to Willet is always on Summer Time.
This is where I'd like us all to start thinking about the problem -- the value and reasoning behind daylight saving time. For starters, keep in mind that this is a minority idea worldwide. Most people on Earth don't use it.
After all, about half the people on Earth have never even used a telephone! It's a developed-world idea. People in parts of the world without clocks get up with the Sun and reckon midday by the moment the Sun is highest in the sky. Why don't we all just do that?
Any way you slice it ...
If we divided the day into "halves" based on daylight and darkness, winter "hours" would be much shorter than summer hours. You can note this well for yourself by comparing a stopwatch or an oven timer, say, to a sundial.
In planetary science, "solar noon" is the moment when the Sun is highest in the sky. But during solar noon the Sun is not straight overhead in North America -- it's actually well to the south. In South America, it's to the north. And, since not everyone starts daylight saving time/Summer Time reckoning at the same time, there are one-, two- or three-hour differences between north and south twice a year. Phew.
But, if you're going to pick a time to start counting, solar noon is a pretty good one. We humans have gone on to divide the year, Earth's orbit of the Sun, into an equal number of seconds: 31,557,600.
By so doing, the clock's noon hardly ever lines up with the Sun's noon. We have come to like it this way. We can make our trains, planes and computer games all work together, coming and going to places north, south, east and west, to altitudes high and low, in the fourth dimension -- in time.
So is daylight saving worth holding on to? For my part, I like it. I love being outside all summer, often missing some good television and not having time for it, even if I record it. But, others must find it a messy inconvenience.
Arizona and Hawaii, sunny places, don't bother. In Alaska, certain citizens' groups want to discontinue it. Why don't we all just get up earlier in the summer and enjoy what Willett called the best part of the day? Apparently, there is something about our mathematical nature that finds daylight saving time appealing.
We've grown so accustomed to our precise arithmetic dividing the year into seconds -- even if we think of the year in larger increments -- that we prefer it to straight-up astronomical reckoning or the Sun's path in the sky.
We'll see how that Dept. of Energy study comes out, but I've got a feeling we all just like moving our clocks ahead, because we can sleep to the same part of the Sun's day, but get up when our clock reads what we feel is a civilized time.
