“It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings”

Question

I have a script that I completed a week ago, without any problem or bug. Today, I tested it again and I received these messages:

Strict Standards: date()

Answer 1

In php.ini, ; comments out a line, so ;date.timezone = "Europe/Lisbon" does nothing. Uncomment that line by removing that preceding ; and restart Apache.

Answer 2

Why not do the following:?

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Lisbon');