Response to "Testing climate reconstructions" (Letters)

Abstract

Rahmstorf criticizes our previous conclusions about the climate reconstruction method of Mann et al. (1) (MBH98). In our previous analyses (2, 3), we found that MBH98 underestimates past temperature variations when tested in climate simulations of the past few centuries. Rahmstorf argues that the simulated Northern Hemisphere temperature lies outside the uncertainty bounds of the pseudoreconstructions in the simulation with the model ECHO-G, but inside the uncertainty bounds in the HadCM3 simulation. He concludes that our analysis supports the Mann et al. (1) reconstructions. This conclusion is wrong. The problem is the determination of the error bounds.