Daylight Savings Time Ends: Turning Back Clocks Is Bad For Health And Environment, Scientists Say

Yahoo! News:

Putting the clocks back in winter is bad for health, wastes energy and increases pollution, scientists say, and putting an end to the practice in northern areas could bring major health and environmental benefits.

Read the whole story: Yahoo! News

Comments

[Howard Steven Friedman]

05:35 PM on 11/07/2010

I talk about the shaky scientific case for energy savings associated with daylight saving time in my blog today http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-steven-friedman/daylight-savingswhos-bene_b_780021.html

My conclusion was that daylight saving time is not going away in my lifetime. Politicians don't care about the shaky scientific case for energy savings but do care about campaign funding and re-elections.

Daylight saving is a minor topic. The much more important point is that, in general, we should be extra cautious of any program or policy whose justification changes over time as the data shows each previous explanation to be questionable or false.

[ValdaDeDieu]

03:53 PM on 11/01/2010

In whose pockets do these scientists reside?

[JackEric94]

05:09 PM on 10/31/2010

I didn't know this had anything to do with going green.

[EndSeparateness]

01:26 PM on 10/31/2010

Artificially manipulating the human experience is silly....

Unless Schedule 1 drugs are involved that is...

[CitizenL]

06:48 PM on 10/30/2010

I prefer standard time so that my sun dial will be accurate. And, no, just turning it does not work that well.

[blueskybigstar]

12:19 PM on 10/30/2010

End it. It makes people cray Z.

Let us compromise. We'll change our real time one half hour between the two times.

[fusionfan]

12:03 PM on 10/30/2010

The Vitamin D argument is lame. The sun is not at a high enough angle to give help you make vitamin D in exposed skin. Plus even people living in sunny climes have low vitamin D levels. Problem is they're indoors all the time and car and home and business window glass is now made to block vitamin D to prevent UV damage to furniture, upholstery, dashboard, and the like.. Take a vitamin D pill.

Having said that, when I was a kid, I always thought it should be the other way around - that one would bring clocks FORWARD in the fall to keep more daylight in the late afternoon. The argument for doing it backwards I heard was mostly to protect school kids taking schoolbuses to school. I still think that's a good reason to go back to standard time.

[graywolf68]

06:33 PM on 10/29/2010

The headline on the Huffpost Green landing page says:

Ending Daylight Savings Time Is Bad For The Planet, Scientists Say

Which is completely different than what the actual article headline and the article itself reads.

Huffpost Green editor slacking on the job?

[HeevenSteven]

04:50 PM on 10/29/2010

Ummm, Clocks go *forward* an hour for Daylight Savings Time. In the winter we go back to Standard Time.

[HeevenSteven]

04:51 PM on 10/29/2010

Nevermind..lol..

[MJinCanada]

03:28 PM on 10/29/2010

I think the change would have minimal benefits.

I live in Saskatchewan where we have been on permanent daylight savings time for most of my life. In the dead of winter, the sun doesn't come up until the kids are in school and starts to set only an hour after they're home. (Since it's coldest just before dawn, it means the kids are on their way to school and people are on their way to work at the coldest time of the day.) Granted, that dead of winter period only lasts a few weeks, but no matter where the clocks are set, we're spending half our waking day in the dark. And it's too cold to expose enough flesh long enough to produce any significant amount of vitamin D.

[Samuel John Colbourne]

01:49 PM on 10/29/2010

Did anybody read those comments on the articles site. Are those people serious? I think it's a great idea.