Comparing the Latitude of Europe and America
vividmaps.com
vividmaps.com
Here is research that argues to the contrary: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-source-of-euro...
It is something i have wondered about because proximity to the heat in the sea is clearly an important factor too, so i am interested. Surely the Gulf Stream must have some impact?
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1027/15406...
Ireland “has the largest emissions per person in the EU for the sectors covered by the regulation.”
It’s remarkable seeing people commute to Dublin from tullamore or even athlone.
Relying less on concrete would help too, wood construction seems to be getting more common at least.
"As far as current models suggest, we conclude that the risk of a northern AMOC shutdown is greater than previously thought,” Drijfhout and his colleagues wrote.I don't know how valid a climate comparison based purely on latitude is though... Surely Egypt is generally warmer than Florida?
Other factors are things like prevailing winds, mountain ranges, altitude and so on and on - the climate system is one of the most complex systems on the planet and even with decades of heavy study and insanely fast computers we still struggle to predict it accurately out past a week or two at most with any degree of success.
https://www.bytemuse.com/post/interactive-equivalent-latitud...
Checking the map -- same latitude as Rome.
"Ok son. Close the window."
Similarly, for storms and such, knowing just how different the east coast of the US is compared to many of the places that people came from is amusing. What I thought of as normal rain is evidently comparable to the gods wanting to kill you. Always amusing when people ask, "doesn't it rain a lot in Seattle" for me. I don't know that I would have called what we get rain.
Not that I don't think we couldn't have a better system. But nobody likes my idea of "base it on the month with 6 going up 10 minutes and 6 going down." Well... I think some folks like the idea, but nobody (including me) thinks that is where we are headed.
Back before Japan adopted our current time system, they adjusted their clocks every two weeks. They adjusted the "hour" markers so that there were always six temporal hours of daylight and six of darkness, with the time period of the hours changing.
I pushed for the idea as it is by far more closely aligned with solar time than what we have. That is, sun dials did this somewhat automatically for many years, no? (They, of course, also stretch how long an hour is... I am not that sadistic)
So, calling it "quaint" is wrong. But a lot of talking past each other. The shift in daylight is much more dramatic for people further from the equator.
(I should add that I have also never used an alarm clock. The shift from DST has never really been difficult to manage. Only was hard when I would be awake, but not leave for work/school on time because I forgot to update the clock.)
What time will X occur in another time zone?
What time will X occur across multiple time zones that shift at different times?
What time will X occur across multiple time zones where one doesn't shift at all? E.g. meetings with people in Arizona.
How long ago did X occur, across a transition? E.g. correlating Unix time to civil time.
How long is X, where X is an event spanning multiple time zones that shift independently? E.g. plane flights.
Does my cron job need to run intermittently every X hours, or at 24/X particular times every day, or every X hours but managed so that processing doesn't intrude into normal business hours?
Personally, when I'm in the wilderness my circadian rhythm follows the sun. Up at sunrise and asleep not long after sunset. That's not how I work when I'm living in society, so I don't see why animal adaptations are particularly relevant here.
On a social level, the shift causes tremendous levels of stress to people. It essentially creates a day of national jet lag, for no real benefit that I can see.
Consider some of the most sensitive for people. Take your medication twice a day. What do people do when they fly across the country? Most don't keep the same schedule they had back home on the medication. They just start doing it at the new place.
Folks that do have "take this exactly every 12 hours" rely on a timer, not a clock.
Even talking about how long ago something was is just not that important for folks in most scenarios. Consider, when people move they don't change their birth date if it would have been a different day in the new location. (That is, nobody does their birthday by GMT.)
Now, about the only idea I fully reject is that we could just tell all businesses to change their opening hours so that we don't have to change the clocks. This is mind numbingly crazy to me. The entire point of changing the clocks is to get everyone to update together.
Also, I assure you people care very much about how long ago they worked when it involves their paychecks and hours worked. Datetime/DST bugs in payment systems and other critical computers are scarily common.
Plus the billions in social costs. Children have to dream with sleep deprivation, hospitals have to treat more strokes, pollution worsens, and criminals get longer sentences.
I'm not sure why changing opening hours is difficult. It's incredibly common to have off-season and high season hours in tourist towns. You don't have to coordinate anything. If the idea of multiple hours is too difficult for anyone, they can simply pick one or the other. Nothing bad will happen.
The benefits we get for the trouble of changing the clocks are minor.
If you want to single out the idea of "shifting timezones" being how we accomplish DST. I agree that is problematic, at best. I can assume there were reasons to do it by completely changing what timezone an area is in. I struggle to understand them, myself. Especially when we don't do the same for other time shifts. (Leap years and seconds, in particular.)
I further agree that doing it in one hour jump is bad. Is literally why I suggest shortening the jump to 10 minutes would be fine. Argument being that that is far more natural for how time was felt by people for most of history. (Indeed, originally, hours were not fixed in terms of how many minutes they took.)
But no, nobody cares what time you said they clocked in yesterday. They care that you accurately pay them for how long they were clocked in for. Obviously, you have to make any system that deals with those work correctly. But, again, people make mistakes on those already, irrespective of timezone changes.
For evidence, see how little energy people expend on how incomprehensible airline tickets are. Look at a ticket and see if you can quickly say how long a flight is. It isn't like they don't know. It just doesn't matter on your ticket. (Even if I like to consider my options based on how long I'll be in the air...)
Is it a good argument to not necessarily change things? Yeah, which is why I think my suggestion of 10 minute changes is largely silly. A lot of inertia in the system we have is not necessarily a bad thing.
Getting everyone to change their operating hours just feels daft to me. And, ultimately, how is that any different?
For example, you want to get it so that schools start/end an hour earlier starting a week. Which means that we still have to deal with the idea that you have to shift your sleep. Probably wise to also go to sleep an hour earlier. And, yeah, I think people could adjust to knowing that they have to change their bedtime from 9 to 8, for example. But, there is a reason we try to keep sunrise and sunset as close to consistent times as we can. No matter where we go.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the data about how much worse the week of the hour loss is. I'd be curious to know if that is better or worse in recent years. And I genuinely don't know how to square the fact that the data dang near cancels out with how much better it is in the week we gain an hour. That, honestly, feels a bit too convenient. (And again, this just gets me back to the idea that the problem is losing a full hour.)
Most of the eastern US gets more inches of precipitation than Seattle. But there are few places (mostly in a band from eastern Ohio and West Virginia, across Upstate New York, through to northern New England) that have more days with measurable precipitation than Seattle.
Someone also pulled data on the fifty largest cities: https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-n.... Seattle is 32nd for amount of rain but 5th (behind Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the band I mentioned, and also its neighbor Portland) for number of rainy days.
I think my favorite is the few times it thunders. People would all move to windows in a sort of awe at the loud noise.
Here's an example: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/
California and Arizona are comparable to Sahara, but Germany has much usable potential too.
If you build solar for much of base load there for those clouded winter weeks where you won't even hope to reach the average winter output then i'm curious what those applications will be that'll fit the model of capitalism.
Are you gonna overbuild 20fold with matching grid (not talking about that north-south connection that Germany can't seem to manage) and have metalurgy industries that will only run in summer?
Or are you going to build/maintain gas plants at a fraction of the cost even if solar panels end up dirt cheap for those weeks where people still want to run their industries and heatpumps and continue to add to the problem.
Looking at my own gov and what i expect from the german one I think I know the answers.
I think that's what makes this interesting. For many people it does and this challenges that assumption.
The climate was similar, temperatures were similar, even the type of vegetation that showed up were similar. Trekking through South African veldt felt much the same as walking through Australian bush
Would you expect a map of comparative latitudes to significantly change in a decade?