Happy midday to you, Colorado, and welcome to another edition of The Temperature, where this week we explain why laughing gas is no laughing matter to planet Earth and we dive deep into newly revealed information about hospital prices.
The election is less than a week away — with major implications for health and climate issues — so the proverbial times are a’changin’. But the times are also literally changing this weekend with the annual end of daylight saving time and the return of standard time.
And that makes this the perfect moment to remind you that the socially popular — but also politically stalled — idea of making daylight saving time permanent comes with one major bug: It would mean we’d have super-dark mornings in winter. Let’s once more trot out this graphic showing sunrise times in Denver for 2023 if daylight saving time had been permanent.
In our darkest days of winter, permanent DST would make folks in Denver wait until roughly 8:20 a.m. before they saw the sun (and they’d still be driving home from work in twilight). Woof…