CHARBONNEAU – Daylight Saving or Standard time,  it doesn’t matter to me

AT FIRST, I thought it was a mistake for B.C. to adopt permanent Daylight Saving Time but now I realize it doesn’t matter.

It seemed to me that time should not be arbitrary. And that’s what Daylight time is. It was arbitrary when first implemented and it’s arbitrary now.

Time should be anchored by something in the real world. Standard time attempts to do that by  aligning time with the sun.

The origins of Daylight Saving Time are flaky. It was created by Germany in 1916 during World War I to conserve coal needed for the war effort. We don’t need to conserve coal anymore.

Now DST is justified by having longer hours of daylight in the evening. Really? Time should be adjusted so we don’t have to BBQ in the dark?

What if people prefer extra hours in the morning? Maybe we should switch to Morning Standard Time where we move clocks back an hour in the spring and give early risers an extra hour of sunlight.

Scientists who study sleep warn that permanent Daylight time could have a negative impact on overall health, especially for children.

“Scientists over the world have been warning about the negative health and safety implications of permanent daylight saving time and have been advocating for permanent standard time instead,” says Myriam Juda, an adjunct professor and sleep researcher at Simon Fraser University.

The ideal, I thought, would be Standard time because noon aligns with the sun at its highest point. That’s  called “solar time.” It’s the time when the sun is highest.

But the argument against Daylight time — that it disrupts our circadian rhythms because solar time occurs at one o’clock — starts to break down when you look at the details.

With Standard time, it turns out that solar time isn’t aligned with noon either. There are few places in a time zone where the sun is highest at noon.

Since the sun rises in the east, solar time at the eastern edges of our time zone is before noon and at the western edges, it’s after noon.

In a time zone as wide as the Pacific time zone, solar time and noon occur at only one place — in the middle.

And where do you think that ideal place is? Why, it’s right here in Kamloops. We’re almost perfectly in the middle of our time zone. The middle is 120 degrees and we are at 120.3 degrees.

To illustrate just how wide our time zone is, here are solar times on June 21 (the summer solstice). I’ll use Standard time since it most closely aligns with solar time.  In Cranbrook, 11:46 am; Kamloops, 12:03 pm; Vancouver, 12:10 pm.

For other places, such as Alaska, the solar-noon difference on the summer solstice is huge: three hours. The disruption of Alaskans’ circadian rhythms is greater as a result of a wide time zone than it would be on Daylight time.

The ideal would be for each place to have its own time but that would be chaotic.

I finally decided that the debate over Standard versus Daylight time is moot. What’s critical is staying on the same time year round.

David Charbonneau is a retired TRU electronics instructor who hosts a blog at http://www.eyeviewkamloops.wordpress.com.