Sunday, March 13, 2016

It's Daylight Savings Time again

For decades, some countries have been switching between daylight savings time in the summer and standard time in the winter. In the good old days when the main energy consumption comes from lighting at night in the summer, such a strategy may be able to reduce the use of incandescent lighting to some extent. Nowadays, the mere savings of lighting is far shadowed by the negative impact of the time adjustment, or the chaos that follows. Farming does not benefit from the time adjustment because the crops still follow their biological clocks. Animals, pets and small children also need a lot of training to cater to such a change, twice a year. Furthermore, in the globalized world of today, many of us need to collaborate with people in other countries, and other time zones. The scheduling of meetings tend to cause chaos as many countries do not use daylight savings time. Even for those countries who do follow daylight savings time, their dates of switching between standard time and daylight savings time tend to be different from the dates in the U.S. This is turning out more like an unnecessary complexity introduced by human to work against the nature.

There are several political movements to abolish daylight savings time:
 
Website dedicated to standard time:

Petition to Congress: End Daylight Savings Time

Petition to White House

Change.Org to Stop Daylight Savings Time


From a popular science point of view, here is the suggestion from National Geographic:

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