To see where the Earth’s climate is headed, we have to see where it’s been — and a new San Francisco State University study could offer a clearer picture.
To see where the Earth’s climate is headed, we have to see where it’s been — and a new San Francisco State University study could offer a clearer picture. The study outlines a way to use a basic law of plant growth to improve estimates of historical temperature and rainfall from tree rings. The results could help answer one of the biggest questions facing climate scientists today.
“There’s a big question here, which is: How warm will it get?” said San Francisco State Assistant Professor of Earth & Climate Sciences Alexander Stine, the sole author of the study. “One way to get at this problem is to build a long record of temperatures in the Earth’s past.”
The rings of a tree document how quickly that tree grew. In the hands of a skilled scientist that can be translated into information about the environment in which the tree grew. Such records are useful because they stretch back thousands of years — far older than any direct measurements made by humans — and because trees are usually abundant where people live.
But when a tree’s growth is threatened by other factors like poor soil quality, the record it holds of climate start to become messier. The new technique applies a simple principle for picking the trees that hold the most pristine record of climate from each moment in history: simply selecting those that were growing the best. “The assumption is that those trees which are most successful in that year are more likely to be responding to large-scale climate,” Stine explained.
Read more at San Francisco State University
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