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We provide a statistical review of the "optimal fingerprinting" approach presented in Allen and Tett (Clim Dyn 15:419-434, 1999) in light of the severe criticism of McKitrick (Checking for model consistency in optimal fingerprinting: a comment. Clim Dyn 58:405–411, 2022). Our review finds that the "optimal fingerprinting" approach would survive much of McKitrick (2022)'s criticism by enforcing two conditions related to the conduct of the null simulation of the climate model, and the accuracy of the null setting climate model. The conditions we proposed are simpler and easier to verify than those in McKitrick (2022). We provide additional remarks on the residual consistency test in Allen and Tett (1999), showing that it is operational for checking the agreement between the residual covariance matrices of the null simulation and the physical internal variation under certain conditions. We further provide the reason why the Feasible Generalized Least Square method, much advocated by McKitrick (2022), is not regarded as operational by geophysicists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]