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There is a considerable body of research that documents millennial-to-centennial climate variability (eg Mayewski et al., 2004). Within this context, Shuman et al.(2005; hereafter S05) analysed 15 pollen diagrams, obtained from the NAPD (www. ngdc. noaa. gov/paleo), to ‘‘yquantify and map the magnitude of climatic change in terms of fossil pollen changes across a range of timescales in order to study the extent and character of climatic changes that caused significant ecological impacts.’’(S05, pp. 2194–2195). They never actually perform a study of climatic change, restricting themselves only to the pollen changes, which they claim ‘‘y represent the magnitude of climatic changey’’(S05, p. 2195). In their introduction, they set two goals. First, they ‘‘y demonstrate that the fossil-pollen data can capture rapid climate changes.’’, a conclusion already demonstrated by Gajewski (1983, 1987; see also, 1993), among others …