How do you explain the affect on the tree-rings worldwide at the same time?
"Explanations in terms of global catastrophes make sense only to those who don't know history outside of the all-Western-Europe plus disjointed politically correct 'multicultural' window dressing version taught in American schools."
Does that apply to Professor Mike Baillie too? (It's his ideas)
And if you don't care about the Roman Empire, then you are ignoring the counter-example which shows the analysis which links the tree-rings and accounts of portents in the sky and bad harvests to civilizational failure to be false.
Civilization collapsed in Western Europe, but did not in the Roman Empire--indeed the article cites Procopius, the court historian to Justinian, who wrote both the official histories and the scandal-ridden "Secret History". Neither bad harvests nor plagues nor cold summers collapsed the civilization whose center had shifted from Rome to New Rome (a.k.a. Constantinople) with the removal of the capital there by Constantine in the 4th century.
You may not care about the Empire, but the author of the article and Baillie (whose name seems misspelled at one point) evently do:
In their book "The Origin Of Comets", Bailey, Clube, and Napier write : "the destruction and chaos accompanying the fate of the Roman empire [midway through the First Millennium] was all but total, the almost complete breakdown of the old order leading to a loss of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of antiquity which was far from temporary."
The old order hardly broke down, except in the areas which had been subjected to barbarian invasion, and accumulated knowledge and wisdom were not lost, except in those areas. Classical knowledge was continuously available in the Empire--it is from the conquered monophysite provinces that the Muslims acquired Greek learning, and notable works of literature containing classical allusions were written throughout the life of the Empire (St. Photius in the 9th century was a notable humanist; Anna Comnena's 11th century biography of her father is rife with references to Homer.) Nor did Roman engineering suffer during the period: one of the great architectural masterpieces of the world and a triumph of engineering with its soaring semidomes supporting the central dome, with numerous windows surrounding the dome and piercing the semidomes, the Hagia Sophia, was build during the very period in question (and its engineers wrote treatises on solid geometry), the walls of Constantinople, which until the gunpowder era only fell to treachery at the time of the 4th Crusade were also built in the 'Dark Ages'.
I am criticizing the link between the claimed global catastrophe and the local conditions in Western Europe. Bad harvests or no, comets and meteors in the sky or no, skinny tree rings or no, the Western provinces had been detached from Imperial rule by the barbarian invasions in practice, though at first not in theory. The barbarians were not assimilated fast enough, and thus brough illiteracy (and indeed an attitude which held that literacy was not a fit pursuit for 'noble' warriors) with them.
Where Imperial rule was maintained, the dire civilizational effects Baillie et al. attribute to planetary bombardment simply didn't happen.