Check this out from Melanie Philips at The Spectator:

Yet another scientific scandal has come to light which knocks another whopping crater in the already shattered theory of anthropogenic global warming. Eight peer-reviewed studies, which for years have played a significant supporting role behind the IPPC’s claims of AGW, have been shown to be fraudulent.

As Andrew Orlowski reports in The Register, the issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy in order to ‘reconstruct’ past temperatures. The papers in question incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia:

This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.

How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement data used in the reconstructions remains a secret — failing to fulfill procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.

At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions B the data has leaked into the open — and Yamal’s mystery is no more. From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.

In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.

And a couple of comments from people on The Spectator:

The whole climate science world is buzzing with this. The first line of defense for the warmists is always to discredit the source. Neither Science nor Nature have an unblemished record. Both have published nonsense – scientific fraud – in the past. It may turn out that much of the warmism they publish now is nonsense, despite the “peer-reviews” by similarly-minded believers. The exposure of the Briffa tree ring fiasco is but one nail in the coffin being fitted for the “consensus”.

and

That may be the case – I have never read the Register. But the allegation is hugely serious and deserves proper investigation. Or would you just rather close down the debate?