MySQL JDBC Driver 5.1.33 - Time Zone Issue

Some background:

I have a Java 1.6 webapp running on Tomcat 7. The database is MySQL 5.5. Previously, I was using Mysql JDBC driver 5.1.23 to connect to the DB. Everything worked. I recently upgraded to Mysql JDBC driver 5.1.33. After the upgrade, Tomcat would throw this error when starting the app.
WARNING: Unexpected exception resolving reference
java.sql.SQLException: The server timezone value 'UTC' is unrecognized or represents
more than one timezone. You must configure either the server or JDBC driver (via
the serverTimezone configuration property) to use a more specifc timezone value if
you want to utilize timezone support.


Why is this happening?

Apparently, to get version 5.1.33 of MySQL JDBC driver to work with UTC time zone, one has to specify the serverTimezone explicitly in the connection string.

jdbc:mysql://localhost/db?useUnicode=true&useJDBCCompliantTimezoneShift=true&useLegacyDatetimeCode=false&serverTimezone=UTC


Stack Overflow Q#26515700, score: 833