Even newer work by Valerie Trouet, and
an international team of scientists in diverse fields,
is focusing on problems resulting from climate change.
>> The trees don't lie, there is a ring every year,
there is no doubt about the dating of the wood.
Then we correlate it to the climate as it exists now, we have living trees that
we compare to the climate as it exists now, and then we bring it back in time.
What we do, when we do treeing analysis or demecology,
is we look at the rings in the wood.
The rings show very similar patterns if they come from the same area.
It's the climate of a region that influences,
that creates that pattern in the tree rings and so, if the climate is similar
over a certain region, the trees will show a similar pattern.
This was a collaboration with Willie Tegel,
who's at the University of Heidelberg and
he has a collection of over 7000 specimens, mainly from the Roman empire.