Hammer of Darkness descends one last time

It's quarter to four in the afternoon. I ate a hot lunch less than two hours ago - and I'm ravenously hungry. It's gloomy and wet outside - in half an hour it will be dark. Yesterday, the sun set at 17:16; today it sets at 16:14. An hour has been stolen from my evening and I won't get it back until the end of March. This whole business of clocks going backwards and forwards is disturbing - the autumn time-change gives us an hour's more sleep but plunges us into darkness an hour earlier. The spring time-changes returns to us that precious hour of evening daylights, but robs us of an hour's sleep.

I am delighted that the EU has - after widespread consultations - decided to do away with this time-change nonsense. For those who suffer (however mildly) from seasonal affective disorder, the continuation of Summer Time into the autumn and winter will be a blessed relief.

Our planet is inclined at 23 degrees to the sun; were it upright to the sun, the entire planet would get 12 hours of day and 12 of night right across the year - equinox would be the norm. Like a stop clock, we get two equinoxes a year, for us here in the Northern Hemisphere, day length varies. From Winter Solstice to Summer Solstice, the day in Warsaw length between a couple of seconds (after and before each solstice) and over four minutes (around the Spring Equinox) a day. From the Summer Solstice to the Winter Solstice, the day in Warsaw shortens, again much more noticeably around the Autumn Equinox than around the time of the solstices.

Below: sunrise and sunset chart for Warsaw (timeanddate.com). Click to enlarge.

The loss of a couple of minutes a day I can deal with - it's the loss of a whole hour that hurts, especially during the first two working weeks after the time change. The sun sets three quarters of an hour before the end of the working day, rather than shortly after it. Warsaw's earliest sunset is at 15:23, between 8 and 18 December (not the shortest days, because the latest sunrise is not until 27 Dec - 2 Jan, at 07:45). The shortest days of the year (21 and 22 Dec) are just over 7hrs 42mins long. The longest days of the year (18-24 Jun) are over 16hrs 46mins long - a difference of over nine hours, (more or less) equally split between sunrise and sunset.

One way or another, here at 52°, we are condemned during the late autumn and winter to leave home and go to work in darkness, and to leave work and go home in darkness.

Is there a better way? I have postulated using technology to change the time of sunset each day, just slightly, by no more than four minutes at equinox, so that at a given latitude we can all enjoy the same amount of after-work daylight the whole year round. How would this work? Let's take 9pm as an arbitrary time (coinciding with the latest sunsets in Warsaw in midsummer). We'd agree that sunset is 21:00 exactly, each day of the year. And adjust sunrise each day in line with that.

Nine pm is four hours after most people finish work - four hours for walking, jogging, cafes etc. It's two hours before most people go to sleep. All year round, we'd have a 9pm (21:00) sunset. But whereas in midsummer, the sun would rise at quarter past four am, in midwinter, it would rise in the early afternoon (around 13:15). Our smartphones, smartwatches and laptops would compensate automatically. Our winter journeys to work would be in the darkness - but they are anyway. All we'd lose is daylight hours while we sit at our desks on winter mornings. But those winter evenings would be long and light!

This time last year:
Big news for Jeziorki
[the housing estate for 8,000 people. Still pie in sky.]

This time two years ago:
Autumn in Warsaw

This time three years ago:
Inside the Norblin factory 

This time five years ago:
Sadness at the death of Tadeusz Mazowiecki

This time seven years ago:
More hipster mounts (Warsaw fixieism)

This time eight years ago:
Welcome to Warsaw

This time nine years ago:
Just like the old days