1.5°C

Here's a quick reminder of what an average global temperature is. An average temperature is the sum of all the temperatures divided by the number of readings. That means some temperatures are lower, some are higher. At the current 1.1°C, 1.5°C  has already been reached, not constantly yet, not everywhere yet.

1.5°C and 2°C or other numbers are not magic numbers, they are checkpoints of climate models. Reaching any average temperature implies that some places are far above that level, so there are places in the world already where we can see what the effects of more heat are. These places are more or less at the poles, the North Pole the most,  and working their way down the latitudes. 

The poles are effectively linked to other climate zones in our ecosystem. We are already experiencing the effect of more energy in the air and water through the higher absorption of water vapor, itself a greenhouse gas, which adds mass to air masses, and adds chaos to the flow of circumpolar jet streams. 

It doesn't have to be a disaster everywhere for unrecoverable catastrophic weather events to happen right now in some places. The usual story we associate with a disaster is: despite some planning and preparation, a disaster occurs, destroying human and animal lives, infrastructure, and in some cases, the shape of land, seas or rivers. As these are rare events, there's period of recovery where the knowledge that that kind of disaster is possible informs the rebuilding efforts. In our new situation, we won't have time to rebuild and the assumptions for designing civil engineering are now unclear.

 This week (March 20, 2023), there will be a 40-50°F shift in temperature in North Carolina, from 29 to 80+ degrees. This stresses animal and plant life, but  also stresses steel and concrete. Cracks in roads and buildings lets in water and plant roots, two powerful corrosive and destructive  forces. This destruction is not proceeding at the pace of centuries.

Ecological system components influence each other. More water squeezed out of the air means more water on land, more fresh water in the ocean. The higher mass of water in the air means the air moves more slowly and powerfully, and the contrast between the weight of dry and wet air means more powerful winds. The parched earth has less capacity to absorb that water, creating new arroyos in what used to be stable formations.

Time zones

Time zones are determined politically. Keeping track of what time it is everywhere is subject to the whims of sovereigns and legislatures. 

Let's step back a little and ask, what do we want out of a clock? For instance, what time should solar noon be? What time should dawn be? What time should sunset be? Why should that matter?

In the tropics, this is not a big deal. However as you leave the tropics, the length of the extent of useful sunlight varies until a day (or night) lasts half a year at the poles. Approaching the poles, "the time" and "the date" are concepts that make sense somewhere else, especially after sundown.

The idea of standardized times and time zones only really dates from the age of railroads. Prior to that, you couldn't get anywhere fast enough to make a difference, and time was very local, based on the loudest clock tower. 

The continental US (sorry, Alaska and Hawaii and Guam) is about 3 hrs and 48 minutes wide. This is currently fit into 4 time zones. These zones have borders based on political boundaries, so parts of each zone may be astronomically separated by more than 1 hour. Furthermore, the length of the day in the southern parts of the country varies less than in the northern parts throughout the year. Summer daylight in Brunswick, ME is about 7 hours longer than winter daylight, whereas in Corpus Christi, TX the difference is only 4 hours. Therefore, it's less disruptive in the South to make no accommodations to the official local time than in the North.

Nevertheless, it'd be nice to get daylight aligned to a working day: so as to be able to be used during whatever passes for a commute on both ends. The easiest way to do that is to make the working day vary with the light available, or to eliminate the commute, period. Agriculture has always needed to align with natural cycles, why not everything else? 

That said, rather than linking everything to Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which makes a lot of sense for any inter-temporal transactions, we'd like to have local times that give you an idea of how much light and heat there will be from the number alone. 

Right now, the time zones we have are not particularly accurate everywhere locally within them, but it's not that impractical. We could move to a system of finer grained zones, say, 8 of them roughly 1/2 hour wide each, and split up north to south so that southern ones don't need to compensate through the year whereas northern ones do, possibly more than twice a year. Fortunately, they'd only be a half hour early or late if they missed the time zone change. This would be much improved in terms of daylight alignment, but people would be even more angry about clock changes than they are now. 

Globally, there already are a number of  time zones aligned on the half hour relative to UTC. All of India, and Iran, for example. Nepal Time is 5 hours and 45 minutes ahead of UTC, showing it can be even more fine-grained.

China, which also spans about 4 hours in width, is all on one time zone, and the day length difference is about 14 hours longer in the summer than in winter in the far north, whereas the difference in Hong Kong is only 3 hours. Clearly, China is not fiddling with the number on the clock to make it correspond to any nation-wide concept of how a named hour is experienced!

To summarize, the current twice-a-year changes, spread among the states and possessions, is a little frustrating twice a year, but again, it's less frustrating than either making it more precise or making it less precise.