In the past I've told people that I reckon much will be made of the Salzer et al. paper in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. The paper purported to find that bristlecones were in fact reliable proxies, despite everyone previously having agreed that they were contaminated with a non-climatic signal.
I'm therefore not very surprised to see this report in the New York Times today.
A study published in 2009 — with Matthew Salzer of the Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona as the lead author — found bristlecone ring-growth rates in the second half of the 20th century to be higher than in any other 50-year period in the last 3,700 years.
“The accelerated growth is suggestive of an environmental change unprecedented in millennia,” the report states. As a result, the bristlecone pine is considered by many dendrochronologists to be an “indicator species” for climate change.
With this, and the fact that CRU's own Tim Osborn has been lined up as a lead author, my prediction is that the Fifth Assessment Report will major on the millennial temperature reconstructions like its predecessors.