Liberal Plot to Destroy the Climate

It looks like Connie M. Meskimen, a divorce lawyer from Little Rock, AR has figured out the evil liberal plot to heat the world.

According to her letter to the editor, she posits that March was so warm because of the daylight savings time change. It adds an extra hour of daylight which of course is going to make things warmer.

And who's to blame? That damned liberal congress. Except, the time change was part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. In other words, a time when congress was still under republican control. Sad thing is that it didn't have jack shit of an effect of energy usage.

Similarly, it doesn't have jack shit of an effect on the climate. Why? Because the length of the day didn't really change. It's fixed. Let's explain.

Hokay. So here's the Earth.That is a sweet Earth. The blue line sticking out, is the line that's perpendicular to the plane of the solar system. The red line is the actual axis of rotation. They're off by 23.5º. As we're looking at it in this picture, we're essentially looking at the Earth from the point of view of the Sun given that we can see the whole Earth lit. You can tell this is also atumnal equniox as I've drawn it since, if the Earth would contintue on in it's counter clockwise orbit, the southern hemisphere would soon be pointing towards the Sun.

But instead of looking at this from the equinox, let's take a look from a different location and switch to the summer solstice (left). I've also drawn in some lines of constant latitude in green to help in explaining things.

First, let's look at the lower line. As the earth spins, a point along that line will come around the left edge of the Earth, as we're seeing it, at noon their time, swing around, cross into darkness, and at midnight, disappear over the right edge.

Yeah, that's nice. But what does it have to do with the length of the day? Well, since the Earth spins at a constant rate (once every 24 hours), the amount of time it's in the daylight is proportional to the length of that line. In the summer, days are longer because that line is longer. Don't believe me? Look what happens if I chop those lines off and compare their lengths:
Here we can clearly see why the day is going to be considerably longer during the summer. In fact, the higher you go in latitude, the longer your day will be. If you go all the way up to the upper circle I have drawn, it never goes into the shadow. So spin all it wants, it's never going to be dark. At least until the Earth orbits to a position that has the other half lit.

Alternatively, at the winter solstice, the other half of the Earth will be lit, reversing the lengh of those two lines. Half way in between (the equinoxes), the lines will be the same length. All of this is due to the angle of Earth's axis with the perpendicular to the plane of orbit.

In other words, it doesn't change based on what time system we use! So what's the big fuss with changing our clocks twice a year?

The idea behind this is that we can arbitarily pick what we define to be "noon". In the most general sense, it's when the sun crosses the meridian (an imaginary line runing along the sky between north and south). But who says it has to be that way? What would happen if we decided to define noon as, say an hour before then?

Well, that would mean that morning would last less time, but then there'd be more afternoon. That's great for businesses and sports that rely on there still being light after people get off of work. Sucks for farmers.

The idea behind the switch this year was that, if we adjusted our system so we'd be up more during the light hours, we'd conserve more energy since we wouldn't have to be using artificial lighting. Sadly, this failed.

But going back to the original letter, arbitrary definitions of our time keeping system have absolutely no effect on the realistic matter of the length of a day.

If God doesn't even get to mess with Earth's rotation Congress sure as hell can't.