Eduardo Zorita has an interesting review of McShane & Wyner's paper on the statistics of paleoclimate reconstructions. He takes them to task for not understanding the actual methods used by paleo people and in particular those used by Mann et al in the Hockey Stick papers. Although one can point to the foggy writing in MBH98 in defence of M and W, Eduardo's point that they should have worked more closely with paleo people is fair enough. That said, Eduardo does spend quite a lot of his review criticising the preamble to the paper rather than the guts of the thing.

When he does get onto the paper, he is less critical, but not convinced. He describes M&W's comparison of reconstructions based on proxies to those from various forms of noise as "interesting and probably correct" but doubts its usefulness because they have used a method that is not used by paleo people. I'm not sure about this - surely if there is a real temperature signal in the proxies, they should outperform noise regardless of the method?

There is a modicum of agreement on the last part of the paper though, with Zorita agreeing with M&W's conclusion that the uncertainties in paleo reconstructions have been underestimated. However, he says that this observation is...

...hardly revolutionary. Already the NRC assessment on millennial reconstructions and other later papers indicate that the uncertainties are much larger than those included in the hockey stick and that the underestimation of past variability is ubiquitous.

I guess the IPCC missed that memo.