Yes, I've followed Real Climate, on and off, and with greater intensity after the Freakonomics fiasco (where RCers were right because of how sloppy the Freakons were), which directly preceded climategate. FWIW, I haven't been impressed with how they handle stuff outside their expertise, like the time-discounting issue.

As for the paper you mention, my primary concern is not that the tree data by itself overturns everything, but rather, that they consider it a valid method to clip out disconfirmatory data while still counting the remainder as confirmatory, which makes me wonder how competent the rest of the field is.

The responses on RC about the tree ring issue reek of "missing the point":

The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

Not using the data at all would be appropriate (or maybe not, since you should include disconfirmatory data points). Including only the data points that agree with you would be very inappropriate, as they certainly can't count as additional proof once they're filtered for agreement with the theory.