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Saturday, June 29, 2024

Ele Ludemann: Keep to Standard Time


If you were up early looking for the stars that form Matariki this morning, you might also have been up early enough to see the sunrise.

The further south you are, the later that would be.

I took this photo at about 7:40am last week, a day after the winter solstice.



The sky was just starting to lighten, the sun didn’t rise until 8:15 and it set again around 5pm.

I raise this because every time the clocks go forward and back for daylight saving, there’s calls to have the same time all year.

I’d support that if clocks didn’t go forward but a lot of people wanting no change want daylight saving to become standard time.

It’s bad enough being so dark, and cold, in the mornings for the first few weeks when the clocks go forward and the last few before they go back.

If daylight saving time lasted all year it wouldn’t get light until after 9am here in the middle of winter and there’d be nothing to gain from it staying light until 6pm when it’s cold.

We live fractionally south of the 45th parallel which puts us closer to the South Pole than the equator.

The sun would rise even later and sink earlier further south.

Children would be walking and biking to school in the dark, roads would be icier an hour later and we’d be using heating for longer in the morning because it would take an hour longer before the sun warmed things up.

Darker mornings would also pose problems for farmers, tradies and everyone else who works outside.

People who want more daylight saving seem to work on the theory that if some of it is good, more would be better.

In doing so they either don’t know, or don’t care, that we don’t get the same amount of daylight all year. Days are longer in summer and shorter in winter

Moving clocks by an hour has the same disruption to body clocks as jet lag, without the fun of travel.

Getting rid of daylight saving would prevent the disruption to circadian rhythms that accompany it, but my support for that is conditional on sticking to standard time.

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.

4 comments:

Valid Point said...

Keeping standard time would only suit a handful of people. The majority of us are more than willing to endure a day or two of ‘jet-lag’ for long, balmy sunlit summer days.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek said...

DST certainly confuses some people.
I recall a Letter to the Editor when it was re-introduced in 1973 in which the writer complained that the new coat of paint that had been applied to the house would deteriorate faster because of the extra hour of sunlight each day.
Fair dinkum!

Scott said...

I'd be happy to get rid of daylight saving time. It's just another government interruption to our lives.

Anonymous said...

Definitely get rid of it, but move us +11:30GMT. 1/3 of the population live at this point geographically: in Auckland. The half that are closer to +11GMT are in the South Island and would get additional light on winter mornings and the half that are in the north and would wake up to the sun in winter, which is better for all body clocks.

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