Earth Hour, or Dying For a Good Night's Sleep...

[patric]

'Earth Hour', a symbolic gesture to turn off city lights for one hour a year, has come and gone, but in the land down under it has highlighted some grave issues:

City lights illuminate a serious sleeping problem
ANDREW STEPHENS
March 27, 2010
http://www.theage.com.au/national/city-lights-illuminate-a-serious-sleeping-problem-20100326-r37d.html

THERE are about 8760 hours in a year, so turning lights off for Earth Hour tonight isn't quite going to avert climate disaster. Melburnians who do flick the switch, though, might find the darkness eases more than carbon dioxide guilt - it might improve their sleep and well-being, too.

Sleep medicine researchers Steven Lockley and Shantha Rajaratnam contribute to a mounting body of research implicating artificial light in disrupted body clocks, sleep patterns and hormone production, linking it to breast cancer, depression, diabetes and obesity. They are worried by our cities' promiscuous artificial light - the light Liberal senator Cory Bernardi is urging us to luxuriously bathe in tonight in opposition to Earth Hour (it's called ''Human Achievement Hour'').

Lockley and Rajaratnam weren't surprised in 2007 when the World Health Organisation listed overnight shift work as a probable carcinogen. This astonishing ruling, by WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer, followed research revealing higher rates of breast and prostate cancer in people whose daily shifts started after dark, exposing them to more artificial light than most of us.

Lockley, an assistant professor in the sleep division of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, says while it is not yet known if light is the sole demon, it is certainly implicated.

Whatever the cause, the Danish government last year started paying compensation to night-shift nurses who had developed breast cancer. Think of what this might mean for all those brightly lit 24-hour supermarkets, petrol stations, convenience stores and factories around the world - or that an estimated 1.4 million shift workers in Australia operate beneath goodness knows how many fluoros.

Lighting, of course, exists thanks to the wonders of electricity, delivered in Victoria (mostly) by coal-fired power stations. While urban light pollution infuriates astronomers - in central Melbourne, night-time lighting obscures 97 per cent of the star-scape - it also worries naturalists alarmed by the impact on animals' breeding habits, especially birds, insects and amphibians.

But the advent of climate change, with a broader population fretting about energy consumption, has made excessive, poorly designed lighting a mainstream issue. Add to that these new alarm bells about health risks and the arguments for rethinking illumination are compelling. In a 2009 New York Academy of Sciences conference paper, researchers said that while evidence implicating lighting in breast and prostate cancer, obesity, diabetes and depression is limited - although large studies are in the works - the evidence is so far consistent. Recent dramatic increases in all of the above illnesses mirror dramatic increases in artificial light usage over recent decades, they said.

''This is a very new thing for us to do to ourselves,'' says Lockley, who was at Monash University last year on a Harvard Club of Australia Foundation fellowship. ''We are only just starting to understand the impact of artificial light on human health. Edison only invented the electric light bulb 130 years ago. We use light to do things we wouldn't normally do at night and, in certain groups, that gets exacerbated. If you think about adolescents and young adults: TVs in the bedroom, computers, texts, phones ...''

He talks about circadian rhythms - the control of our daily patterns of physiology, metabolism and behaviour - and how they are fundamental to all living creatures and how the 24-hour light-dark cycle resets the internal clock in the brain every day, controlling hormones such as melatonin and cortisol. Under normal light-dark conditions, melatonin is produced only at night - but light exposure at night inhibits this production.

No wonder a paper on carcinogenity and shift-work published in The Lancet two years ago cited severe impacts - a huge increase in tumour development, for one - on rodents whose cycles were disrupted by constant light, dim light at night or simulated chronic jet lag. It makes one think of all those colleagues in artificially lit workplaces who've had cancer.

Lockley's colleague Dr Shantha Rajaratnam, an associate professor in the School of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine at Monash University, says something simple has changed: in centuries past, we used to get a good seven to eight hours' sleep, at night, in completely darkened environments. Where has our fear of darkness driven us?

''While it has been the belief that sleep disturbance is a symptom of many different types of psychiatric conditions, it's now becoming more acceptable to think of it the other way around,'' Rajaratnam observes: more studies are suggesting sleep disturbance might actually predict the onset of depression.

But how do we get people to go to bed, turn their gadgets off, block out street lighting and have a solid, restful sleep?

''I once suggested to some undergraduate students that to improve their sleep, their internet access should be cut off at midnight,'' says Lockley. ''The suggestion was met with uproar - it was impossible for them to conceive such a thing.''

They'd love, perhaps, Human Achievement Hour - 8760 times each year.

[sgrizzle]

What I don't understand is why "earth hour" is during such a very low-usage time period.

[Gaspar]

I'd like to see what happens if 1/4th of the entire US grid drops load all at once.

Then I'd like to see what happens when that grid attempts to pull the load again.

Not sure, but I assume there would be "challenges."

[Red Arrow]

What I don't understand is why "earth hour" is during such a very low-usage time period.

It's not as showy if you turn the lights off during the day.  Who would notice?

[nathanm]

He talks about circadian rhythms - the control of our daily patterns of physiology, metabolism and behaviour - and how they are fundamental to all living creatures and how the 24-hour light-dark cycle resets the internal clock in the brain every day, controlling hormones such as melatonin and cortisol. Under normal light-dark conditions, melatonin is produced only at night - but light exposure at night inhibits this production.

I wish my circadian rhythms would get reset by the day-night cycle. You people with working internal clocks don't know how good you have it. 

[patric]

I'd like to see what happens if 1/4th of the entire US grid drops load all at once.

Then I'd like to see what happens when that grid attempts to pull the load again.

Not sure, but I assume there would be "challenges."

Here it's mostly our coasts, but I hear it's quite a party in Europe.

[sauerkraut]

I did my part, I flipped on every light in my house and turned on every TV set. That's my way of saying what I think of this "green" hoax nonsense.

[sgrizzle]

It's not as showy if you turn the lights off during the day.  Who would notice?

PSO

Cutting your electric usage at night is like saying your are going to diet from midnight to 5am.

[Gaspar]

PSO

Cutting your electric usage at night is like saying your are going to diet from midnight to 5am.

I'm going to try turning off my lights tonight when I go to bed.

Hey I've got an idea.  Why don't we just make every Monday "Earth Hour Monday."  Everyone can participate by sleeping in one extra hour.  Seems like that would be relatively easy to market. 

Just a thought.

[Hoss]

I did my part, I flipped on every light in my house and turned on every TV set. That's my way of saying what I think of this "green" hoax nonsense.

Kinda like your 'living in Tulsa' hoax?

Until I see material proof, I ain't believin' it.

[heironymouspasparagus]

Yeah,... I still haven't seen his birth certificate, so he must be a fraud.

[Hoss]

Yeah,... I still haven't seen his birth certificate, so he must be a fraud.

Nah, just ask him for his Omaha library card; I'm sure he thinks that's a valid ID.

[sauerkraut]

Kinda like your 'living in Tulsa' hoax?

Until I see material proof, I ain't believin' it.

I bought a home in Tulsa in November of 2009. Ask me if I care what you believe or don't believe.

[Hoss]

I bought a home in Tulsa in November of 2009. Ask me if I care what you believe or don't believe.

Don't pass yourself off as a long-time Tulsan then.  Because that you are not.

And I still don't believe it.

I'm sure I'm not the only one, either.

[RecycleMichael]

I think you guys should give the Kraut a break on his residency. Attack him (or me) for his views, but I believe him now when he says he has purchased a home in Tulsa.