I have read the comments from the three anonymous reviewers and the reply from Eaves et al. to those remarks. On the basis of the general commentary that the paper was very well written, the science was sound, it makes a valuable contribution to the field, and the willingness of the coauthors to accept critiques and offer solutions to address them, I recommend publication of this work in Climate of the Past. Final acceptance will be subject to execution of the editorial plan that is provided as a response to all three reviewers (loaded to CPD on 13 March by Eaves et al.) and resubmission of the revised work in a timely fashion.

The authors have executed the editorial plan in accordance with my wishes. this paper is very close to acceptance.
However there are two small things that are needed.
1.) there is a Townsend in preparation citation that will need to be updated or at the very least, edit this so that it does not say in prep, followed by in preparation.
2.) the figure caption of the new figure 1 is cut off. please rescale the figure accordingly so that the figure and embedded caption fall onto the page. We can then push this to the general public after that, and some small edits (including use of correct open and closed quotation marks) and spacings should be picked up by CP editorial staff.