[ad_1]
A woman is holding a clock to change the time in Biot, France. (Sebastian Nogier / EFE-EXE) (Sebastien Nogier / EPA-EFE / REX / Shutterstock)
Anyone trying to make an international call this weekend would be forgiven for having a little mixed up.
Summer time ends Sunday in the United States, which delays the clocks for one hour. The change took place in Europe a week earlier, which means that the time difference between the continents was momentarily smaller.
This is another confusing ride in a confusing time process that confuses the world.
Today, 70 countries change the clock in the middle of the year, including most countries in North America, Europe and parts of South America and New Zealand. China, Japan, India and most countries close to the equator do not retreat or take the lead. In much of Asia and South America, the switch to summer time was adopted and then abandoned. It has never been observed in most African countries.
While the United States has extended its summer time in 2005 and Florida wants to make it its standard time, other countries are abandoning it. The European Union is considering a plan to abandon the transition from summer time to mid-term. "Millions. . . I think that summer should be all the time, "EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker told German journalists in August. Juncker was referring, in part, to an online survey by the EU, which concluded that the clock change was extremely unpopular. (As my colleague Rick Noack pointed out, however, there are methodological problems: "The largest part of the participants came from a country – Germany – where the change of schedule was a bit strange topic for years, however, any decision of the EU also to the other 27 Member States. ")
Even if the US has approved the change, it should be approved by the European Parliament and each of the 28 member states. But it seems that it is possible. Abolishing the daylight saving time is the rare bipartisan problem in Poland. Russia and Belarus abandoned the process years ago. (Russian scientists say that the risk of heart attack has increased by 50% and that the suicide rate has increased when the clocks have changed.)
A few days ago, Morocco removed the fallback solution of the summer time, just before the clocks were turned on. This will save "an hour of natural light," Minister of Administrative Reform Mohammed Ben Abdelkader told the Maghreb Arab Press.
The concept of summer time has been proposed by several people around the world, largely independently of each other. In 1895, a New Zealand entomologist, George Hudson, proposed to shift the clock by two hours so that insects hunters would have more sun on the evenings. Seven years later, William Willett, a British builder, suggested staggering the clock to "prevent the country from losing daylight." Willett made the proposal to the British Parliament and continued to defend it until his death in 1915.
In 1916, the German government adapted Willett's idea as a means of saving money during the First World War. Other European countries and the United States quickly followed. In 1919, the summer time was repealed in the United States. He returned, via a federal law, in 1966. It was implemented by the European Union in the 1980s.
Read more:
Summer time ends this weekend. Here's how things would change if we got rid of them.
Endless Summer (or Winter?): Europe Plans to End the Daylight Saving Time
"Termination of chaos": How the day has solved the madness of American clocks
[ad_2]
Source link
