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SAVE THAT DAYLIGHT FOR A RAINY DAY

by Hazed

Our American readers will be struggling out of bed this morning all confused, because clocks have gone forward one hour as daylight saving time begins in Canada and the US. Here in the UK and the rest of Europe, there's another three weeks until we fiddle about with time. So I have three weeks of befuddlement as every day the reset will take me by surprise...

I'm fed up with the twice-yearly time change and I wish they would just choose a time and stick to it all year round. A new study shows that we may well be better off if we did just that! Conventional wisdom says that daylight saving time saves energy but it turns out this is not necessarily so. A study took advantage of the fact that until recently, only a few of the counties in Indiana followed daylight saving time, the rest leaving the clocks alone - but then they all decided to fall in with the rest and follow the clock-changing procedure two years ago. This gave researchers a unique opportunity to study how the time shift affected energy use.

To read more about this fascinating study, and to see the results, read this article in the Wall Street Journal.

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