If Dolphins Could Tell Time

If Dolphins Could Tell Time Here’s a brain-teaser you can take to your “End of Daylight Saving Time (DST)” party this weekend. DST ends Sunday, November 7, at 2 a.m., and we set our clocks back by one hour. “Spring forward, Fall back”, is all we need to remember twice a year. The brain-teasing question is as follows: In San Diego, will there be more, less, or the same amount of daylight (the time from sunrise to sunset) on Sunday versus the day immediately prior, Saturday, November 6? Think you have the answer? Let me add additional true facts and see if you change your thinking. In San Diego, sunrise will be at 6:11 a.m. Sunday and 7:10 a.m. on Saturday. Sunset will be at 4:52 p.m. Sunday afternoon and 5:53 p.m. on Saturday. To repeat the question: Will the amount of daylight on Sunday be more, less or the same amount as on Saturday? I only pre-tested the question on one person prior to publishing it. She guessed correctly on the third try. The answer is at the end of this essay. A year ago, I first addressed changes in Daylight Saving Time and the gains and losses in daylight over the course of a year, especially as they have an impact on people with Seasonal Affective Disorder and those who find DST-related abrupt time changes to be unnecessarily disruptive to their lives. A surprisingly large number of you responded (several responses appear in an addendum at the end of this essay) with personal stories and comments, so many that I decided to take another couple of cuts at the phenomena again this year. For instance, using the end of Daylight Saving Time this weekend as a reference point, I looked at sunrises and sunsets one month before and one month after this Sunday. Comparing what will occur on December 7 with what did occur on October 7, the sunrise on December 7 will be 9 minutes earlier (more daylight), but the sunset will be 102 minutes earlier (less daylight) than on October 7. This 93 minute net reduction in daylight hours will be almost entirely at the end of the day, when people would have liked to be outdoors in daylight but will experience post-sunset darkness instead. For sufferers of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), in particular, the “extra” period of darkness from the tilting of the northern hemisphere away from the sun, exacerbated by the one-hour setback on clocks this Sunday, is bad news indeed. Human beings are the only living creatures with the ability to tell time, a skill we learn early in life. (Well, maybe dolphins could tell time too, if they had access to clocks or other timepieces. After all, they are widely regarded as highly intelligent!) Obviously, they can’t tell time, but it is true that many plants, animals and other living things do respond to the cumulative effects of changes in temperature and other seasonal influences like rainfall, as well as to the gradual ebb and flow of daylight over the course of the year. Incidentally, differences in the amount of daylight from one day to the next can range anywhere from as little as a fraction of a second of extra daylight at the Summer Solstice (June 21, 2021 versus June 20) to as much as (almost) two minutes per day of increases or decreases in daylight at other times of the year. (Daylight Saving Time, and the hours, minutes and seconds measured by timepieces, while critically important to clock-watching humans, are meaningless to plants, animals and other living creatures. Ditto measurements of days, weeks, months and years. Not quite, but it almost begs the question of which animals are the most highly evolved.) Another way to understand more fully why DST and daily changes in the amount of daylight available in San Diego, or any other location for that matter, affect us so strongly is to look at the ranges of times during the morning and evening when sunrises and sunsets occur. Again, sunsets vary far more than sunrises, and as a result are much more noticeable and meaningful to humans. In San Diego, for example, during 2021 sunrises will vary by 79 minutes from their earliest time to their latest time in the morning. Sunsets, however, will vary by 198 minutes from earliest to latest. I will close by paraphrasing a few of my conclusions from last year’s essay: We can’t prevent DST from ending on November 7, nor can we stop the northern hemisphere of the earth from tilting away from the sun this winter. But not being able to dodge these bullets does not mean we can’t try to reduce the damage they cause—economic, emotional and social…Talk to one another…Discuss better ways to cope…Devote more resources to addressing the causes and effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder, a real disease affecting millions of people…Legislate the year-around adoption of Daylight Saving Time or abolish it altogether. Note: the data on sunrises and sunsets can be found in a website called “Timeanddate”. It’s a treasure trove of interesting facts. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Correct answer: There will be two fewer minutes of daylight this Sunday, November 7, compared with Saturday, the 6th. Remember, earth completely ignores Daylight Saving Time as its northern hemisphere tilts either toward or away from the sun over the course of a year. DST is an artificial construct, a man-made (they-made? It-made?) rule people live by, but not mother earth. (I am so ancient. Is “mother earth” still PC?) If we do not push the clock back by an hour on Sunday at 2 a.m., sunrise will be at 7:11 a.m., which would be one minute later than the 7:10 a.m. sunrise we will have this Saturday. A later sunrise means less daylight, in this case, one minute less. Similarly, if we do not push the clock back by an hour Sunday morning, sunset will be one minute earlier, at 5:52 p.m. Sunday versus 5:53 p.m. on Saturday. Any earlier sunset, of course, means less daylight. One minute of a later sunrise plus one minute of an earlier sunset will squeeze two minutes out of the daytime hours this Sunday. Rather than 10 hours and 42 minutes of daylight Sunday, we will have 10 hours and 40 minutes as the northern hemisphere continues to tilt farther away from the sun, leading to “days growing shorter” until the Winter Solstice on December 21 (after which the days will start growing longer). Incidentally, given that December 21 is the shortest day of the year, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day also are short, barely ten hours of daylight each day, giving Santa precious little time to make his appointed rounds. Friends, please be aware I rounded off seconds to minutes to avoid complicating what already is a numeric challenge. For purists, the two extra seconds of darkness this Sunday versus Saturday actually are one minute and 38 seconds. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Extra Credit Reading—comments I received a year ago in response to my original piece on Daylight Saving Time: some emotional, some humorous, but all insightful. One woman said, “to be honest, I appreciate the extra hour of sleep. (But) the excitement of this gifted extra hour quickly wears off…Mental health professionals should be at the forefront of addressing the challenges of Daylight Saving Time (and Seasonal Affective Disorder). A friend wrote: “This year was the first year in my life that I didn’t have my Mom to commiserate with about the end of DST. We always dreaded this day.” Another opined that DST “messes up our daily routines and biorhythms.” He added, “It is one more change in an ever-changing world that we can just do without.” A former student wrote, “The mental health toll of COVID-19 is now exacerbated by DST and it is important to recognize this and openly talk about it so hopefully we can all understand that ‘no one is alone’ and ‘this too shall pass’”. A friend who had lost her husband a few years ago explained how she dreaded the end of DST as the start of a “time of isolation” but also added this more comforting thought: “My only consolation is a cozy fire.” An alum of the University of San Diego graduate degree program in real estate had this insight: “I remember growing up in Argentina we used to have DST and so many people complained that it was removed years ago.” Two of the lighter responses were as follows: A former student of mine now living in Phoenix after having lived in Southern California for many years said, “With all of the power of the supreme leader of California, I would have thought that he would have mandated no DST this year.” Last, from another friend: “Maybe I will take up drinking again.”