text: Finally we come to nonsense variables argument made by Burger and Cubasch. Their basic argument here appears to be that CFR methods such as those used by Mann et al (1998), Rutherford et al (2005) and dozens of other groups of climate and paleoclimate researchers, are somehow prone to statistical overfitting in the presence of trends, which leads to the calibration of false relationships between predictors and predictand. So their above claim can be restated as follows: calibration using CFR methods such as Rutherford et al (2005) and multiproxy networks with the attributes (e.g. spatial locations and signal-vs-noise characteristics) similar to those of the proxy network used by Rutherford et al (2005) will produce unreliable reconstructions if the calibration period includes a substantial trend. They believe that such conditions will necessarily lead to the selection of nonsense predictors in reconstructing past variations from the available predictor network.