Exerpt from Firstpost online newspaper: "Global warming: Nature goes against Science"

Dodgy claims, overblown headlines, basic errors of fact: can you trust anything in the papers these days? Not the tabloids, that is, but the research papers in top science journals.

When science mags go tabloid, they damage faith in science itself, says robert matthews.

In December 2005, the leading UK science journal NATURE made world headlines by publishing "evidence" of the disappearance of the Gulf Stream. So worrying a finding in so prestigious a journal predictably sparked scary headlines in the world's media. "Scientists probing a dying current bring worst climate fears to the surface", declared The Australian; "Is Britain on the brink of a new Ice Age?" asked the Daily Mail.

Many scientists already knew the answer to that one: no, we aren't. They immediately viewed the study's conclusion with suspicion, not least because it flew in the face of so much previous research. Some quickly spotted the most likely explanation: the NOC's data simply didn't justify its conclusion.

Amazed that this has been missed by Nature's supposedly rigorous referees, one climate expert, Prof Petr Chylek of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, wrote a formal letter to the journal pointing out the error; it was never published. Now Prof Chylek has gone public with his concern that Nature is more interested in getting media coverage than publishing reliable science.

In the current issue of Physics Today, he points out the basic errors in the NOC paper, and then reveals a telling detail. In its original form, the title of the paper had included a question-mark, highlighting the uncertainty of the conclusion.