Time change: we switch to winter time! Date and explanations – Linternaute.com

CHANGE OF WINTER TIME 2021. The change to winter time 2021 takes place this weekend. Date, time, direction of the hand offset or what we know about the end of the seasonal time change … Here is the manual for the 2021 winter time change.

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On the night of Saturday, October 30 to Sunday, October 31, 2021, at 3 a.m., you will have to turn the hands of your old watch or your ancestral clock back one hour. It will then be 2 hours. Of course smartphones like all connected devices will switch to winter time automatically, without any intervention being necessary. The maneuver will artificially gain us an hour of sleep. But we will also lose an hour of light at the end of the day, in addition to the natural and gradual shortening of the days as the day approaches. winter solstice, in December.

Not only is the 2021 winter time change not the last, but there are several other time changes that still have to follow afterwards. According to the European Commission, quoted by Le Figaro.fr, the abolition of the time change will not take place “probably not even in 2022”.

Apart from the delay caused by the Covid health crisis, what is blocking is the harmonization between the member states. The European Union has three time zones today, and an EU directive suggests letting each state choose whether or not to remove the time change, and then switch to either standard time or to permanent summer time. The said European Union directive was validated by the European Parliament in March 2019, but it must also be validated by the Council of Ministers (which unites the representatives of the different EU Member States). This is where the negotiations slip.

As recently confided to the newspaper Sud Ouest by MEP EELV Karima Delli, who oversees the reform in Brussels, the situation is “at a standstill”. On March 26, 2021, the MEP already lamented to the South West: “several southern European states were not particularly favorable to the end of the time change, unlike northern European countries. Everyone had their idea “. Due to the current deadlock, “it would be extremely difficult to envisage an end of the time change for 2022 or [même] 2023 “, she concluded.

In February 2018, the European Parliament polled EU citizens on the subject of the time change. 80% of them then said they were ready for the end of the time change. In March 2019, a citizen consultation conducted via the website of the National Assembly gave a fairly clear advantage (nearly 60%) to the choice of daylight saving time as permanent seasonal time: 59% of voters did so. then declared favorable.

41% of those polled are “for permanent winter time”, 40% “against”

According to an exclusive survey conducted by YouGov France for the Internet user *, to the question “In the long term, to what extent are you for, or against, the fact of staying permanently in winter time?”. 41% of respondents answered “For”, 40% said they were “Against”. The result is therefore very tight. If we refine the verdict, 18% of respondents say they are “totally” to stay permanently in winter time, while 23% are “more for”.

On the other hand, 22% of French people questioned say they are “totally against” permanent winter time, and 18% “rather against”. 19% of those questioned simply do not know whether they are for or against winter time all year round, in other words a permanent difference of one hour with solar time, against a difference of two hours when is in summer time.

* Survey conducted in line from October 6 to 7, 2021, out of 1,007 people representing the French national population aged 18 and over.

The time change was introduced in several European countries in the 1970s. The price of energy was then increased tenfold by the first oil shocks caused by theOPEC. France, for its part, adopted the summer time measure in 1976. Objective: to save electricity by grabbing an additional hour of natural light in the evening. A controversial credo for several decades because of the negative collateral effects of the double seasonal time change, without sufficient benefits in return. The time change dates were harmonized in the 1980s between the EU member states, to promote the fluidity of communications and transport between them.