(May 2, 2019 at 1:47 pm)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Tree rings are routinely used to gauge weather. Thin rings mean a poor growing year, etc.
Yes. And by matching the annual pattern of weather indicated by the rings in a piece of wood and correlating them to the pattern of weather indicated by another piece of wood known to be from similar regions, and repeat the process with more pieces of wood until one gets to a piece known to be cut down at a specific time, such as yesterday, it is possible to independently determine exactly which year each ring on each pieces of wood was formed completely without using C14.
You can then measure the c14 decay of a particular ring to precisely determine just how accurate within measurement error a particular method of c14 dating is. It turns out even the most primitive, uncalibrated c14 age dating technique is still pretty accurate.
