Industrial Revolution

• As a result, the distribution of manufacturing capacity in different countries and regions has been constantly changing, forming a dynamic global pattern of production capacity.
• Under open market economy, an international division of labor has been formed due to the comparative advantages of countries.
• Through international trade, they share the benefits brought about by this division of labor and specialization.
• Instead, it is a natural phenomenon of international division of labor and specialization based on comparative advantages during the process of economic globalization.

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• Many will argue that daylight saving is pointless, outdated or even unhealthy, and we need to get rid of it.
• In sharp contrast to what many sensationalised reports and opinions might suggest, my research results indicate the vast majority of Australians – 80% – support daylight saving.
• That said, there were some differences between those who support daylight saving and those who do not.

So who typically supports daylight saving?

• Supporters of daylight saving are more likely to be female, higher-income, urban and employed full-time.
• Support for daylight saving is strongest among Australian Greens and Liberal Party voters.
• Supporters of daylight saving also tend to live farther south, where the difference between summertime and wintertime daylight hours is greater.

Why do we have daylight saving?

• The basic premise for daylight saving is that afternoon daylight is more useful than early morning daylight, so we “borrow” an hour.
• Read more:
  Daylight savings: how an hour of extra sunlight can benefit your mental health

  Could we just wake up earlier?

• So, although daylight saving may seem anachronistic, it appears to be the most palatable solution for adjusting to seasonal changes in day length.

Confusing time zones are a problem

• Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia and ACT have observed daylight saving since 1971, but it gets much more complicated than this.
• In the winter, Australian states and territories observe three time zones.
• When we include territorial dependencies such as Norfolk and Christmas Islands, Australia observes ten time zones in the summertime, or 11 if you count Eucla’s local time zone.
• The following maps show current time zones in summer and winter, and the proposed alternatives discussed below.

How could daylight saving be improved?

• “Permanent daylight saving” is an idea that would realign Australia’s current time zones so as to obviate the need for the biannual change.
• This would permanently shift Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne an hour or half-hour forward.
• Many similar proposals have been floated in both the United States and Europe, most notably the US Sunshine Protection Act.
• Read more:
  As the US pushes to make daylight saving permanent, should Australia move in the same direction?

Thomas Sigler receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
This study was funded by the Office of Wilson Tucker MLC, independent member for the Mining and Pastoral Region in the parliament of Western Australia.

• The entire process was controversial and the two us who are on the subcommission (chair Jan Zalasiewicz and vice-chair Martin Head) even refused to cast a vote as we did not want to legitimise it.
• In any case, the proposal ran into opposition from longstanding members.
• Many geologists, used to working with millions of years, find it hard to accept an epoch just seven decades long – that’s just one human lifetime.
• He and his colleagues were perfectly aware that humans had been doing that for millennia.

It makes no sense, Crutzen said, to use the Holocene for present time. He conceived the Anthropocene as the time when human impacts intensified, suddenly, dramatically, enough to push the Earth into a new state. The science journalist Andrew Revkin (who thought up the name “Anthrocene” even before Crutzen’s inspiration) aptly called it the “big zoom”.

Flesh on bones

• We’re part of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) that has been gathering evidence to put geological flesh on the bones of Crutzen’s concept.
• The AWG had a mandate: to assess the Anthropocene as a potential geological time unit during which “human modification of natural systems has become predominant”.

• It’s a nicely laid out, easy-to-understand picture that summarises the changes caused by human activity over the last million years.
• But what is lost here is any sense of the quantified rate and magnitude of change, other than by a little shading.
• The Y-axis is what scientists use to show the magnitude of measurements such as temperature and mass.

• They show that Crutzen’s Anthropocene is real, evidence based, and represents an epoch-scale change (at least).
• The repercussions cannot fail to last for many thousands of years – and some will change the Earth for ever.

Epoch vs event

• So the Anthropocene as an epoch is very different from the “event” of Erle Ellis and others, which encapsulates all human influence on the planet (and so is about a thousand times longer than the epoch, and differs in many other ways).
• ), it could perfectly well complement an Anthropocene epoch.
• That’s the Anthropocene as an epoch.

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• Colin Waters is Chair of the Anthropocene Working Group.
• Martin Head is part of the Anthropocene Working Group and the Quaternary Subcommission.