But
at the same
time, it's
important to keep in mind that science is a ground on which trial and
error over
time leads to progress, and it would be wrong to discount wrong hypotheses all together as completely worthless — they do also play a role in this setting by providing a kind of «dynamic force» and keep the debates going.
Non-climatic environmental factors will certainly have been
important for individual trees
at different
times, but these factors are regarded as haphazard events with random distribution over space and
time and, hence, they can be regarded as part of the random
error variable (ε t) in the conceptual linear aggregate equation (Eq.