Dear authors,

Thank you for uploading responses to the referees. As you have seen several of the reviewers were enthusiastic about the value of your analysis and the reporting of this negative result. I also appreciate the completeness in re-running your analyses with a different nitrogen cycle parametrization.
At the same time, Reviewer 2 had a number of major concerns about the way the motivation for the work is presented, and Reviewer 3 also had significant suggestions for framing your work's implications in terms of differences between your ENSO-expression findings and other work suggesting that interannual variability can affect long-term outcomes. In light of these comments, major revisions to the writing are needed. While I appreciate many of your posted responses to the referees that the concerns raised are not likely to qualitatively change the take-away results of your manuscript, it would still be useful to amend the manuscript writing/discussion to make sure that these issues are as clear to the reader as you make them for the reviewers. For example, the Park et al 2020 motivating reference is not proposed to be cited, the lagged effects mentioned in response to reviewer 2 will not be mentioned, etc. Indeed comments 2 and 3 from Reviewer 3 are not proposed to be addressed in the manuscript text at all. Please reconsider some of these before submitting a revised manuscript.

Best regards,
Alex konings

Dear authors,

Thank you for creating a detailed revision of the manuscript. I agree with the reviewers that the paper is now much improved, and I am pleased to say it is now suitable for publication. Please do consider the small changes still suggested by Reviewer 1.

Best regards,
Alex