Let’s get a few things straight about daylight saving time, this meteorologist says

Is it time to change? Meteorologist weighs in about what it would look like

How do you feel about daylight saving time? (Photo by Sam Lion from Pexels)

Earlier this week, the Senate unanimously approved a measure that would make daylight saving time permanent next year.

The bipartisan bill approved Tuesday would ensure Americans would no longer have to change their clocks twice a year.

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But the bill still needs to pass the House and win the signature of President Joe Biden to become law.

Senators from both sides of the aisle made their case for how making daylight saving time permanent would have positive impacts on public health and the economy and even cut energy consumption. Nearly a dozen states across the U.S. have already standardized daylight saving time.

Chief Meteorologist Frank Billingsley, from our news partner in Houston, wrote a blog, giving some context to the situation. You can read it here.

Here are some snippets of what he had to say:

First, it’s not MORE daylight.

The reason for more daylight in the summer months has to do with the tilt of the Earth and where the sun is in the sky.

We will not get any more sunshine on any particular day because of this change. Here are the hours of sunlight on the 20th of each of our 12 months, and those hours stay the same:

This doesn't change
This doesn't change

So, you can see that 10 to 14 hours of daylight from winter to summer is what we see every year, regardless of standard time or daylight saving time.

So then: What changes?

When the sun comes up

It’s when that sunlight starts and ends by our clocks that would change.

We are simply shifting the sunlight from one part of the day to another. During previous wars, we decided that changing the clocks forward would begin the daylight later and end it later, giving munitions workers more sunlight by which to work in the evenings.

After the wars, we went back to normal standard time.

In the 1960s, supposedly, the golf industry pushed for more evening daylight so people could play golf after work. Then the candy industry pushed for the extra daylight time to go past Halloween, so we changed it to November’s first weekend.

Look at current sunrise times for Dec. 21 versus when we’ll have sunrise if we DO NOT change the clocks back in the fall: See Frank’s blog for the view.

Frank asks ... is this really what you want?

This would mean that those cold, winter morning commutes would be in the dark.

Getting kids to school would be in the dark.

Walking to school or work, waiting on the bus, crossing downtown streets -- all in the dark.

See what it would mean for the northern states, who have to deal with a more traditional winter (think: SNOW).

Frank’s advice? “Look before you leap -- this is not about your sleep!”

Then he signs off, “Frank (who remembers when we did this in 1974 and it was an utter disaster).”

Read the full blog here.


The Associated Press contributed to this report.