What is Daylight Savings Time & how it effects you

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Have you wondered why Daylight Saving Time begin at 2 a.m.? This Sunday most U.S. residents will gain an hour of daylight as it's time to spring forward.

The annoyance of resetting all the clocks in your house—or forgetting to, and consequently throwing off your entire day—may make you question why we bother with this routine in the first place.

Daylight saving time is most often associated with the oh-so-sweet extra hour of sleep in fall and the not-so-nice loss of an hour in spring. But some of the original reasons for resetting our clocks twice a year include saving on electric bills, and having more daylight hours for retailers, farmers, sporting events and other activities that benefit from a longer day.

Few people will likely wake up exactly at 2:00 a.m. local time to move the clock hand, or dial, forward an hour. But that's when daylight saving time officially begins on the second Sunday in March. It ends on the first Sunday in November, when clocks are turned back at 2:00 a.m. local time to read 1:00 a.m. That is, for everyone except those who live in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and by most of Arizona, with the exception of the Navajo Nation.

Why two o'clock? The thinking goes it's late enough that most people would be at home, with few bars and restaurants being affected. In addition, it prevented the date from switching to yesterday; it would be confusing if, say, we changed the clocks at midnight back to 11 p.m. The time is also early enough that the clock-hand change occurs before early shift workers and early churchgoers might be impacted, according to the WebExhibits, an online museum.

When it began
Daylight saving time has a rocky past. Established in the United States in 1918, daylight saving time was a contentious matter and was repealed in 1919. The standardized clock changes, however, were re-established nationally early in World War II and observed from Feb. 9, 1942 through Sept. 30, 1945.

After the war, U.S. states were free to choose whether to observe daylight saving time, and if they did, the calendar start dates of the time change. The result was time confusion for travelers and newscasters. In 1966, Congress enacted the Uniform Time Act, which stated that if any state observed daylight saving time, it had to follow a uniform protocol, beginning and ending on the same dates throughout the country.

The start and end dates have changed over the years, with the most recent change in 2007 setting the start date on the second Sunday in March and end date on the first Sunday in November – adding four weeks to the total stint compared with years prior.

Saving energy
The idea of saving energy was one primary motivation behind the 2007 shift, but it's arguable whether the change will be worthwhile. In 2007, the California Energy Commission estimated that the extra month would save the state only one-half of 1 percent of their current energy expenditures.

Here's what the Department of Energy found when they looked back at energy saved nationally in 2007, by extending the DST:

•Total electricity savings: about 1.3 Tera Watt-hour (TWh). That corresponds to 0.5 percent per each day of extending DST, or 0.03 percent of electricity consumption over the year, which was 3,900 TWh.
•The electricity savings generally occurred over a three- to five-hour period in the evening though there were small increases in usage during the early-morning hours.
•On a daily percentage basis, electricity savings were slightly greater during the March (spring) extension than the November (fall) extension.

(Turning clocks back in the fall could mean an extra hour at bars, which tend to close at 2 a.m., right?  Not so, according to the California Energy Commission.  Bars actually close at 1:59 a.m., so they are already closed when daylight saving time begins.  Sorry, LarryJ.)

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Do have any idea who suggessted Daylight Savings Time?  You might be surprised.

Daylight saving time, a source of confusion and mystery for many, strikes again this weekend. The idea of resetting clocks forward an hour in the spring and back an hour in the fall was first suggested by Benjamin Franklin in his essay "An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light," which was published in the Journal de Paris in April 1784.

Franklin's suggestion was largely overlooked until it was brought up again in 1907 by Englishman William Willett, who penned a pamphlet called "The Waste of Daylight." Although the British House of Commons rejected Willett's proposal to advance the clock one hour in the spring and back again in autumn in 1908, British Summer Time was introduced by the Parliament in 1916.

Many other countries change their clocks when adjusting to summer time, but the United States only began doing so towards the end of World War I in an attempt to conserve energy. The House of Representatives voted 252 to 40 to pass a law "to save daylight," with the official first daylight saving time taking place on March 15, 1918. This was initially met with much resistance, according Michael Downing, author of the book "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time."

"When the Congress poked its finger into the face of every clock in the country, millions of Americans winced," Downing wrote. "United by a determination to beat back the big hand of government," daylight saving time opponents  "raised holy hell, vowing to return the nation to real time, normal time, farm time, sun time—the time they liked to think of as "God's time.'"

Despite the public outcry, government officials enforced the time change until 1919, and allowed state and local governments to decide whether to continue the practice. It was reinstituted during World War II but, again, after the war the decision fell to the states.

In fact, even when Congress officially made the time change a law under the Uniform Time Act of 1966, it only stated that if the public decided to observe daylight saving time, it must do so uniformly. Hawaii and Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Reservation), still choose not to partake in the convention, as do some U.S. territories, including American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Originally, clocks were sprung forward on the last Sunday in April and turned back on the last Sunday in October, but the Energy Policy Act of 2005 shifted the start of daylight saving time to the second Sunday in March and the end to the first Sunday in November.

During both World Wars, the United States and Great Britain observed daylight saving time as a way to cut back on electricity usage.

After the wars, U.S. states were free to choose whether to observe daylight saving time and the calendar start dates of the time change. This resulted in time confusion for travelers and newscasters, so in 1966, Congress enacted the Uniform Time Act, which stated that states that observed daylight saving must follow a uniform protocol: Throughout the country, daylight saving time would begin on the first Sunday of April and end the last Sunday of October.

In 2007, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 went into effect and extended daylight saving time by four weeks, starting it three weeks earlier in spring and ending it one week later in fall. Daylight saving now begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday of November. That extra week gives trick-or-treaters a precious extra hour of candy-gathering before sunset.

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Daylight Saving Time: Healthy or Harmful?

For decades advocates of daylight savings have argued that, energy savings or no, daylight saving time boosts health by encouraging active lifestyles—a claim Wolff and colleagues are currently putting to the test.

"In a nationwide American time-use study, we're clearly seeing that, at the time of daylight saving time extension in the spring, television watching is substantially reduced and outdoor behaviors like jogging, walking, or going to the park are substantially increased," Wolff said. "That's remarkable, because of course the total amount of daylight in a given day is the same."

But others warn of ill effects.
Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, said his studies show that our circadian body clocks-set by light and darkness-never adjust to gaining an "extra" hour of sunlight to the end of the day during daylight saving time.

"The consequence of that is that the majority of the population has drastically decreased productivity, decreased quality of life, increasing susceptibility to illness, and is just plain tired," Roenneberg said.

One reason so many people in the developed world are chronically overtired, he said, is that they suffer from "social jet lag." In other words, their optimal circadian sleep periods are out of whack with their actual sleep schedules.

Shifting daylight from morning to evening only increases this lag, he said.

"Light doesn't do the same things to the body in the morning and the evening. More light in the morning would advance the body clock, and that would be good. But more light in the evening would even further delay the body clock."

Other research hints at even more serious health risks.

A 2008 study in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that, at least in Sweden, heart attack risks go up in the days just after the spring time change. "The most likely explanation to our findings are disturbed sleep and disruption of biological rhythms," lead author Imre Janszky, of the Karolinska Institute's Department of Public Health Sciences in Stockholm:

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc0807104?__utma=240918044.1176663421.1331446925.1331446925.1331446925.1&__utmb=240918044.1.10.1331446925&__utmc=240918044&__utmx=-&__utmz=240918044.1331446925.1.1.utmcsr=bing|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=daylight%20savings%20time%20for%20pets%20-%20images&__utmv=-&__utmk=82068245&

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Are Pets Affected By Daylight Saving Time?




You might think it unlikely that the switch to daylight saving time (DST) could throw your cat or dog's busy schedule — eat, sleep, eat, sleep — off-kilter. But, as it turns out, some animals are so in tune with their owners' schedules that the one-hour spring forward can cause some confusion.

Just like humans, animals have their own internal clocks that tell them when to eat, sleep and wake up. This biological timekeeper, also known as circadian rhythm, is set in motion by natural sunlight. However, for pets this effect is minimized by the artificial environment they live in, where light comes on not with the rising sun but with the flip of a switch.

Humans set their pets' routines, said Alison Holdhus-Small, a research assistant at CSIRO Livestock Industries, an Australia-based research and development organization.

"Animals that live with humans develop routines related to human activity — for example, cows become accustomed to being milked at particular times of day, or pet dogs become accustomed to going for walks or being fed at a particular time of day," Holdhus-Small said. "When humans apply daylight saving time to their own lives, if they carry out their routine according to the clock, the animals can become confused." [Why Do We Observe Daylight Saving Time? ]

Holdhus-Small gives some examples of how animals might respond to a time change: If a farm owner arrives an hour later (when the clocks are turned back) to milk the cows, they will be waiting, bellowing because their internal routine tells them that they're late. Conversely, if the farmer arrives an hour earlier (when the clocks are turned ahead) the cows will not be inclined to come in to milk until closer to the "proper" time.

"When humans change the clocks for daylight saving , to suit our preferred working environment, from an animal's point of view, we are suddenly behaving oddly," Holdhus-Small said. "To the animals, it is inexplicable that suddenly dinner is an hour later or earlier than expected."

This behavior shift could cause animals psychological and physiological stress, Holdhus-Small said. A cow's udder, for example, will continue to produce milk regardless of DST and pressure will build up until the cow is milked. Household pets might get grumpy when they show up to an empty food dish at their perceived dinner time.

So when you set your clock forward an hour this weekend, remember that your pets need a little paw-holding during the time change. Holdhus-Small suggests gradually changing the animal's activities by a few minutes a day rather than the whole hour at once.