Should Spring Forward become Spring Back and Fall Back become Fall Forward???

Why turning our clocks back Sunday makes no sense

Back in 1784, hanging out in Paris and heady with Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin had an idea. Struck by the fact that Parisians were sleeping during sunlight hours and then staying up late at night by candlelight, he calculated the number of candles that were being wasted -- and came up with a very impressive number, 64 million pounds worth of them. Franklin therefore jokingly proposed a massive schedule change, noting that a fortune could be saved through "the economy of using sunshine instead of candles," and even suggested at one point that perhaps cannons be fired at sunrise to get everybody out of bed.

 So what caused daylight saving to apparently backfire (rather than backlight)? 

"In the spring, you are basically making people wake up in the early morning, the coldest time of day, when they might turn up their heat,"

 explains Yale's Kotchen. 

"And in the summer, if you take an hour of sunlight and you move it from the morning and put it in the evening, people are more likely to be running their air conditioner harder in the evening." 

That's because heat from the sun builds up over the course of the day, making that particular hour of sunlight hotter than it would have been if it occurred in the morning rather than the evening. 

So the "Benjamin Franklin effect" -- people using less artificial lighting -- turns out to be overwhelmed by heating and cooling choices.

DYI