That was my first impression of Daylight Savings when I got up for work this morning.
Yes, now Perth has daylight savings and once again old debates have been stired up regarding the pros and cons of it all.
Myself I am not really against daylight savings but I also don’t see the need for it here in Perth. In fact, this is the fourth time that it has been trialled here with referendums at the end of each trial ending in a vote against the permenant implementation of it.
It’s not just about curtains fading because of a supposed extra hour of sunlight or the cows getting confused about what time they are getting milked, there are some genuine reasons against daylight savings.
While it is easy to say that Perth and Sydney are generally two hours apart in time, this is only a clock time. To be exactly two hours different Sydney would need to be 30 degrees east of perth when in fact it is closer to 36. This actually means that, discounting two hours, daylight starts and ends earlier in Sydney.
Or as the Perth Observatory put it “Sydney is about a degree east of its time-line (150E) and has both sunrise and sunset about 4 min. earlier than a place on the time-line*. Perth is about 4 degrees west of its time-line (120E) and has both sunrise and sunset about 16 min. later than on the time-line* (* at the same latitude). You could say that Perth has an inbuilt daylight saving of 20 minutes, compared with Sydney”
Well, 20 minutes is a difference but it’s not really that big a difference and the closer to the equator you travel, the less effective daylight savings actually is.
To put it in context, here are the hours of sunrise and sunset on the day of the summer solstice, 2006
| Perth (22 December 2006) |
Sydney (22 December 2006) |
London (21 June 2006) |
|
| Sunrise | 06.08 | 05.41 | 04.43 |
| Sunset | 20.22 | 20.06 | 21.21 |
I don’t think that Perth really needs to have daylight savings. It is understandable on a place like London where, without daylight savings it would start to see twilight at around 2 in the morning, but here it is just an exercise in sun loving and, with such a high rate of skin cancer, is that really the best thing to be doing.
Having said that, I’m just going to wait and see how I feel a few weeks into the trial.
