“…The mid-Holocene interval has been the focus for model simulations, model-model comparisons, paleodata synthesis, and model-data comparison since the beginning of PMIP, and this work has contributed to model evaluation and understanding of climate change in the last three major assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Flato et al, 2013;Folland et al, 2001;Hegerl et al, 2007;Jansen et al, 2007;Masson-Delmotte et al, 2013). The changes in insolation are characterized by enhanced seasonal contrast in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) (and reduced seasonal contrast in the Southern Hemisphere, SH), giving rise to warmer NH summers and a significant enhancement of the NH monsoons (COHMAP Members, 1988;Hély et al, 2014;Lezine et al, 2011;Saraswat et al, 2013;Tierney et al, 2017). Systematic benchmarking against pollen-based reconstructions of climate variables and lake-level-based waterbalance reconstructions (Braconnot et al, 2007b(Braconnot et al, , 2012Coe and Harrison, 2002;Harrison et al, 1998Harrison et al, , 2014Harrison et al, , 2015 has highlighted the fact that climate models persistently underestimate changes in the monsoon precipitation and produce too much continental drying (Harrison et al, 2015).…”