A couple of years back in a Scandinavian country they wanted to get rid of the whole summer time-standard time thing. It didn't go anywhere and it's now regulated at the European level, but the seeds of that idea was planted.
So fast forward a couple of years and the idea is officially proposed with the idea to poll the European people.
Really, so far so good. The poll was held, it says "get rid of it", done and done right? Well not exactly.

Firstly lets address the elephant in the room; basically only German people voted. Now this is entirely the fault of the member states in not promoting the poll in anyway. But I'm also biased since I agree with the outcome.

The important part however is the fact that the EU is giving each member state to either stick with summer time or winter (aka normal) time. Germany wants to have summer time and the members that already share Germany's time wants to follow suit.

This would mean that Spain, France, Belguim, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which should be in GMT+0 follow Germany from GMT+1 into GMT+2. And that's where the problems start.

Essentially the argument comes down to this; human bodies want to wake up at dawn and go to sleep at night. When you deviate too far from this you will impact both your mental and physical health. Seriously, a messed up sleep pattern gives you increased risks on a wide array of issues. Ranging from depression to obesity and heart issues. Now we all know the majority of people start working from 8-ish and stop around 18-ish. So the easiest way to talk about this is to have the sun at it's highest point at noon; the middle of the day coinciding with the middle of the daylight day.

OK, so how do time zones work? Simple, draw 23 lines from the geographic north pole to the geographic south pole, take the middle of each 'lane' and set the clock to noon when the sun is at it's highest point in the sky. Now I'm from the Netherlands and that means that at noon, it's still 40 minutes till the sun is at it's highest point in normal GMT+1 time. This should already clue you in; the Netherlands, together with Belgium and Luxembourg, are the least affected by a switch between GMT+1 and GMT+0 (this is not summer time). France and Spain would see their average time deviation of noon-highest point in the sky disappear almost completely. So we belong in GMT+0 and GMT+1 is already a compromise (the Netherlands at noon is 20 mins away from GMT+0 noon and 40 minutes away from GMT+1 noon).

What does this mean if we switch to summer time permanently? We go to GMT+2 and gain another hour in deviation. At noon it'll take another 100 minutes before the sun is at it's highest. Remember, this is just a short hand for talking about how early and late sunrises and sunsets are. In this case, in the winter months the sun can rise as late as 09:50, when children are at school for up to 2,5 hours already. Office workers will have been at their office for at least an hour already. And these people need to wake up, get ready, and commute too. You're essentially forcing everybody with a 'normal' schedule to wake up, travel, and start in the dead of night! Seriously, we're talking Istanbul and St. Petersburg time.

Now the easy answer is: go to GMT+0 for Western Europe, but especially with how the UK is behaving, that might be a hard sell.
The next easy answer is: ignore Germany and go with GMT+1, but the government doesn't want that.
Now comes the hardest answer: join Germany in going to GMT+2, but change at what time we start the day. Start 1 hour of, preferably, 2 hours later. School at 10, work at 11, etc.

The last option combines the best of both worlds in a compromise. Namely we keep the same time as our neighbours, in fact this creates a single time zone from Spain to Finland, from Poland to Egypt and half of the Democratic Republic of Congo to South Africa! But we also get to keep our natural rhythm so we don't negatively affect the population of our countries due to lack of sleep at healthy hours.



Now this was mostly a rant post, but what are your thoughts?
What's the first thing you thought, how surprised were you with the differences between noon and the middle of daylight, etc etc?