Large discrepancies exist between twentieth-century tropical Indo-Pacific sea surface
temperature trends determined from present reconstructions. These discrepancies prevent
an unambiguous verification and validation of climate models used for projections of future
climate change. Here we demonstrate that a more consistent and robust trend among all the
reconstructions is found by filtering each data set to remove El Niño/Southern Oscillation
(ENSO), which is represented not by a single-index time series but rather by an evolving …