A few Daily Post readers may have noticed, since December 21, the days have started getting longer again, thanks to the 23.5 degree tilt of the Earth’s axis.
I imagine almost none of us noticed that the tilt has increased slightly over the past 20 years.
According to a group of scientists in Korea, humanity’s habit of pumping groundwater — about 2,150 billion tons from 1993 to 2010 — can be blamed for increasing the Earth’s tilt by about 31 inches.
To wit:
We show that a useful constraint is found in observed polar motion (PM). In the period 1993–2010, we find that predicted PM excitation trends estimated from various sources of surface mass loads and the estimated glacial isostatic adjustment agree very well with the observed. Among many contributors to the PM excitation trend, groundwater storage changes are estimated to be the second largest (4.36 cm/yr) toward 64.16°E.
Be that as it may, one issue that stirs the imagination of advisors to President-elect Donald Trump concerns changes to the nation’s clocks.
Incoming Trump administration advisors Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy posted recently in favor of dumping daylight saving time.
On the flip side, in 2022, the U.S. Senate advanced a plan to make daylight saving time permanent.
Either plan would get rid of the twice-a-year clock changes, something almost two-thirds of Americans say they want.
But what do we want, instead? Darkness in the morning? Or darkness in the evening?
Or maybe we don’t really care which way it goes, just so long as it goes… away.
According to a modest bit of research, it appears that ‘daylight savings time’ first became popular in Europe during World War I, when certain leaders thought factories would use less electricity as a result, and maybe farmers would be more productive as well. The U.S. soon followed suit, encouraged by the United Cigar Stores Company.
100 years later, we’re still doing it, but without any clear evidence that it actually generates energy savings. When Indiana adopted daylight saving time statewide in 2006, the data on power consumption before and after, published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, showed that residential electricity use increased by 1 percent because people used more AC on longer summer evenings, and more heat on darker, chillier mornings.
Over the weekend, I found a map on The Washington Post, showing how much morning darkness U.S. counties would experience in the depths of winter, if the federal government mandated permanent daylight savings time (as proposed by the U.S. Senate plan in 2022) or if they outlawed daylight savings time (as proposed by Elon and Vivek.)
Here’s the link to the interactive map.
(Our typical Daily Post readers likely care most about Archuleta County, although some might also want to look up the options for Texas or Arizona or even Florida. )
If we got rid of DST but kept “Mountain Standard Time” the sun would rise in Archuleta County (depending on the time of year) at some time between 4:47am and 7:22am and would go down between 4:50pm and 7:32pm.
If we got rid of “Standard Time” and locked in DST, sunrise would come between 5:47am and 8:22am, and sunset between 5:50pm and 8:32pm.
We might notice that these times indicate a one hour difference. As we might expect.
The big question doesn’t appear to be “saving electricity” because there’s no clear evidence for that result. The big question is, who gets to make the rules?
Elon Musk? The U.S. Congress? The Colorado legislature? The New World Order?
When I moved to Alaska in 1971, the state stretched across four time zones. Then one of the governors — hotel magnate Bill Sheffield — decided it would be better for businesses and government in Alaska is everyone set their clocks the same. That change to “Alaska Time” resulted in some curious temporal effects, such as winter sunrise in Nome happening in the afternoon.
But most of Alaska is virtually uninhabited by humans, and in some places the sun doesn’t come up at all in the middle of winter, and doesn’t set at all at midsummer. So “time” itself is kind of imaginary.
The U.S. initiated a two-year trial of ‘permanent daylight saving time’ in 1974, in an attempt to ‘save energy’… as the country struggled through an energy crisis so serious that only a single light had adorned the National Christmas Tree in 1973.
The experiment lasted just 10 months. Americans reported that the sunless mornings made them cranky, sad and feeling less safe, and research later backed them up, suggesting that ‘permanent standard time’ aligns better with our biological rhythms. Especially our sleep patterns.
President Gerald Ford canceled the 1974 effort, and most parts of the country have been on a clock-changing system ever since.
One more thing to mention. When I relocated with my family, from Alaska to Pagosa Springs in 1993, I learned about a somewhat unusual social practice referred to as “Pagosa Time.” If, for example, a plumber was scheduled to come and fix your leaking pipe at 11am on Thursday, they would actually show up at 4pm the following Monday. If they showed up at all.
One of the unexpected benefits of living in paradise.
The “Pagosa Time” effect has since lost some of its power and influence, as more and more of our local workforce has moved into government jobs. It seems that, for whatever reason, government employees watch the clock more carefully than tradesmen.