Response of tree growth to climate changes could have critical effects on regional vegetation dynamics, terrestrial biogeochemical cycles, local climate feedbacks and human well-being. Changes in spatiotemporal pattern in tree growth were closely coupled with past climate changes, increased extreme events and disturbances. Characteristics of climate changes during past decades were summarized. Responses of tree growth to climate change and potential feedbacks to climate system were reviewed. Knowledge gaps in tree growth response to climate changes were discussed. Possible future directions in this field were summarized. More effort should be paid to the spatial-temporal divergence in tree growth response to climate changes and climate feedbacks in different seasons and climate zones. Great concern should also be raised on emerging regional tree growth die-off and underlying mechanisms. Additionally, there tends to be an urgent need to identify effect of wide-spread increase in both occurrence and intensity of extreme events (e.g., global-change-type drought and heat waves) and disturbances (e.g., fire, pest, etc.) on tree growth and the possible underlying threshold-based nonlinear processes. Synthetically, combination of ground-truth observations at different time-scale, remote sensing, and land-surface models could reasonably improve our understandings of tree growth response to climate changes on different scales and ability to predict future vegetation dynamics in a warmer, and more extreme world.