Saturday, 28 March 2009

Against the clock!

And here comes the next travesty. Today – or in fact tomorrow we’ll put the hands of our clocks one hour forward to put them back to the actual time for our time zone in October. I’m not against time shift made in the early spring – we all benefit from it, I’m against turning the clocks back in the autumn. That would mean changing the time zone but would turn out to be beneficial for all of us – in the aspect of utilising the daylight. Let’s give the example of today – today the sun rose at 5:20 and will go down at 18:03, and I bet all of you fast asleep at 5:20, but you’ll be still on your feet at 19:03 – that proves we under-utilise the sunlight. I guess if an average human is active these days between 7:00 and 23:00 it would be advisable in Poland to have the summer time and the winter one, as a benchmark, but to join the universal time zone. We wouldn’t have to have the lights on for so long. The shortest day would break at 8:45 and finish at 16:15 – it much better fits the working hours of the offices which turn to nine-to-five scheme. At the time around equinox in March the sunlight would last from 6:30 to 18:50, the longest days of June would start a quarter after five but would end at 22:00. That’s how it functions in the West. In western Lands of Germany it was light around 22:00 in August, in Paris the dusk came in April between 20:30 and 21:00. Our daily routines have changed, chiefly after the collapse of communism, we no longer get up at the daybreak and don’t turn in before 22:00, we got used to keeping late hours. In the era of electricity when we don’t have to burn the candle we stopped appreciating the value of energy – we still pay of bills but forget that the energy resources are finite…
If you could show up your care for our planet join the action of WWF
The extensive study of the logics behind turning the clocks can be found here
PS. For me, personally the best possible solution would be to stick to the summer time for the whole year!
I even found the instruction for the dim-witted ones

No comments: