Quote Originally Posted by -42- View Post
Doubtful, Rome had quite a few nails in her coffin aside from any percieved climatalogical issues. And tree ring data has been shown to be unreliable at best.
Actually, tree rings are pretty good. The only place tree rings are worthless is in environments where there is not a winter to cease growth -- e.g. the tropics. Furthermore, as any good experiment, the researchers pooled data from other sources such as peat bogs to corroborate findings.

What I am taking away from this is that issues with climate change or El Nino/La Nina events could have been the hair on the camel's back. If you live in the west, food isn't so much of a problem. The agriculture industry is pretty good at taking care of things. Still, even in the UK when the snows hit in December, you can get food shortages. Go back 2,000 years, add in everything that was going on that we are familiar with it looks bad. But even then consider such things as decreased tax revenues from poor harvests for the Romans. Even further, consider being a Germanic tribe when you yourself have a poor harvest. The relatively prosperous regions of the south under the control of Rome look very tempting.

In the end, does climate change -- or maybe the better term for that specific era would be variability -- have a role to play? I'd say very possibly so; especially considering the confounding factors that we are more familiar with.