Dear WeatherCat daylight savings time haters,
This morning I found the following article from the Washington Post on a elegant study done to test if daylight savings time actually does save energy:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/07/why-turning-your-clocks-forward-sunday-costs-you-money/Researchers from the University of California - Santa Barbara took advantage of a change in laws that forced Indiana regions to switch to a uniform daylight savings time. Before there were three groups: Eastern Standard plus daylight saving, Central Standard plus daylight saving, and Eastern Standard without daylight saving. Anybody who knows anything about designing statistical studies this is just about the perfect arrangement of control and study groups.
In 2006, Indiana forced all regions to operate on the same daylight savings. The researchers then checked to see how energy used changed. To their great surprise, energy use -
increased - by 1% on average. That isn't much, but it will depend on the particular circumstances of weather, latitude and so on. In some states the increase could be substantially greater. What is certain is that daylight savings increases energy use - not decreasing it.
This really shouldn't come as a big surprise. Daylight savings made sense in a time when people relied on daylight as their principle light source. Today, the vast majority of people don't require sunlight. Even agriculture no longer is bound to daylight. Using artificial light, harvesting is done at night to prolong product freshness. Since we use energy in order to provide the environment needed for work or play, sunlight doesn't play the role it once did in our activities.
As to why energy costs went up, the researchers point out:
"In the spring, you are basically making people wake up in the early morning, the coldest time of day, when they might turn up their heat, and in the summer, if you take an hour of sunlight and you move it from the morning and put it in the evening, people are more likely to be running their air conditioner harder in the evening. That's because heat from the sun builds up over the course of the day, making that particular hour of sunlight hotter than it would have been if it occurred in the morning rather than the evening." So, the evidence is now basically irrefutable. Daylight savings should be scrapped. It doesn't save energy and has well documented health and safety downfalls. Alas force of habit is hard to overcome. Perhaps the most mind-boggling advocates of daylight savings are environmentalists. They clearly forget that until the invention of clocks, humans relied on the location of the sun in the sky as their indicator of time in the day. Those same environmentalists now demand to mess up our interaction with the natural indicators of time in order to ultimately
not save any energy. Clearly environmentalists are not as in touch with nature as they believe.
Cheers, Edouard
![[cheers1]](https://athena.trixology.com/Smileys/default/food-smiley-004.gif "Cheers")
