text: This hardly deals with the nonsense predictor problem. The question is whether a proxy (as arguably bristlecones) are affected by an unrelated trend or by long persistence. Low AR1-coefficient red noise behaves a lot like white noise in that the effects attenuate quickly ("short memory"). The Mannian null test is irrelevant. The null test described here was described in MBH98 (not in Mann et al 2005 as far as I can tell).