Abstract
Responding to a discrepancy between dendro-reconstruction and climate model during large volcano eruptions, scientists have been debating a missing tree ring (MTR) hypothesis—trees missing an annual ring at a large scale due to extreme cooling. Although both parties claim victory, their arguments are shown to be compromised in our analysis. On the one hand, one party’s argument based on the rarity of missing rings in current data cannot serve as evidence against the MTR because data collection methods already assume the MTR to be impossible; on the other, the other party’s hypothesis testing cannot support the MTR because it merely shows that data in volcanic years are less certain, which is known. Lastly, our analysis highlights a current knowledge gap in tree growth in extreme conditions and thus we urge scientists to perform natural and interventional experiments to understand tree growth limitations. Filling this gap will enhance dendro-reconstructions.
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Notes
SG13 find that the highest missing rate is 11.3%. A 17.9% in Mongolia is also seen (Zhu 2016, 46).
Note that statistical analyses and software will not help mitigate the problem either because (1) statistical analyses based on correlation are merely an “automatization” of the majority-rules logic; and (2) decisions are still made by experienced dendrochronologists and the software will not say “I think 92% of the rings are missing and the remaining 8% of narrow rings are not anomalies.”.
For example, dendroclimatologists try to determine the most suitable proxy parameter for temperature reconstruction by comparing latewood maximum density and ring width (Büntgen et al. 2015; Esper et al. 2015; Stoffel et al. 2015; Tingley et al. 2014). Spatial statistics is used to reconstruct annual maps of temperature anomalies that is consistent with volcanism (Anchukaitis et al. 2017). Other paleo-proxies have been used to reconstruct the heterogeneity of NH cooling following large volcanic eruptions (Guillet et al. 2017). Data assimilation is also used to examine the effect of biological memory and spatial coverage (Zhu et al. 2020).
Or if the cooling events in question were far apart in the record from the extreme summers relevant to the MTR.
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Li, D. If a tree grows no ring and no one is around: how scientists deal with missing tree rings. Climatic Change 174, 6 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03424-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-022-03424-w