The tree rings "prove [the] climate was WARMER in Roman and Medieval times than it is now," the British newspaper the Daily Mail reported last week, "and [the] world has been cooling for 2,000 years.". That and other articles suggest the current global warming trend is a mere blip when viewed in the context of natural temperature oscillations etched into tree rings over the past two millennia.
The tree rings do help fill in a piece of Earth's complicated climate puzzle. However, it is climate change deniers who seem to have misconstrued the bigger picture. Instead of using the width of trees' rings as a gauge of annual temperatures, as most past analyses of tree rings have done, Wilson (, a paleoclimatologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a co-author of the study) and his fellow researchers tracked the density of northern Scandinavian trees' rings marking each year back to 138 B.C. They showed that density measurements give a slightly different reading of historic temperature fluctuations than ring width measurements, and according to their way of reckoning, the Roman and medieval warm periods reached higher temperatures than previously estimated.
Sources:Yahoo
Incompetent people too ignorant to know about it
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