Climategate [Paperback]

Mosher and Fuller were at the forefront of the revelation that Hadley's CRU was acting out of line. They were careful about moving ahead unless or until the leaked emails were deemed authentic. The reader can trust this volume. What many anthropogenic global warming advocates do not know is that workers at the CRU were concerned about the strength of data that showed the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was much warmer than the 20th Century. The leaked emails reveal this concern and how some ethically challenged scientists endeavored since the mid-1990s to diminish the importance of the MWP and devise support for the erroneous notion the the 20th Century was the warmest period of the past millennium. This book by Mosher and Fuller honestly chronicles that revelation. This book is a step -- albeit an important one -- in the citizen's quest to understand the empirical truth about anthropological global warming. Everyone who desires to have a thorough understanding of the issue must read this book and recognize the importance of the leaked CRUtape letters.

This book details the history of respected (up to now) climate scientists here and abroad (mostly UK) who colluded and connived to create inaccurate reports, conceal their fraud, malign their critics and prevent them from publishing in journals that they influenced, lie about their raw data, lose their raw data, deny peremptorily requests for data, delay and then refuse to respond to Freedom of Information requests, promise to destroy files rather than release them to FOIA requesters, and attempt to call for criminal prosecution of those who procured correspondences and data that confirmed all this. Their highly unscientific behavior - normal enough I suppose in other fields of endeavor - does not define them or their work, but it is repetitive, and frequent enough and deliberative enough to call the rest of their work into question. Students have been expelled for less.

The closest analogy would be the Pentagon Papers, for which Daniel Ellsberg received praise rather than vilification. But the Vietnam War was not an object of adoration as is our self-flagellating anthropogenic global warming.

This is quite the thriller, with a fascinating documentation of how scientists can be gradually corrupted by the heady power of convincing the UN, world leaders, and (to a slightly lesser extent) the people of the world that we are headed for disastrous climate change and must undertake supreme efforts within the next decade or condemn our grandchildren to famine, flood, and hurricanes. Mosher was near the heart of the early confused reception of the Climategate emails, when the leaker (Mosher presents strong reasons for it being a leaker, not a hacker)attempted time and again to get his message out (even, ironically, including sending the link to the main blog for the defenders of the status quo) and no one paid any attention. The leaker sent one message ("And then a miracle occurred") with a link to the documents and no one clicked the link! Finally Mosher and others began cautiously reading, wondering if this was a hoax, calling persons whose emails they were reading to see if they were authentic, and gradually realizing that this was the break of a lifetime, akin to the release of the Pentagon Papers. The book is valuable just for bringing the readers in to the middle of this white-hot period.

The remainder of the book is a fairly complete chronological history of the emails with a reasonable effort at explaining the backstory for the general reader. It was of course thrown together in a very short time and shows it. (So I give it only 4 stars). The co-authors describe themselves as "Lukewarmers", neither alarmists not denialists, accepting that global warming is occurring but not convinced it is mostly caused by man and not convinced that superhuman efforts are all that can save the planet. The larger story here is an almost Shakespearean tragedy as the scientists at the heart of the story become more and more desperate to keep the millions of dollars in research funds coming despite the awareness that their models are not working. No doubt this will take years to be sorted out, as the most prestigious science journals of our time gradually come to realize they fell into a scientific consensus built on sand.

As an astrophysicist, I learned long ago of the Milankevitch cycle, which has led to about 7 Ice Ages lasting about 100,000 years each in the last million years, and which it seems will inevitably lead to another one down the road. Do we think we can change the precession of the poles (Vega will be the North Star in 13,000 years), the wobble of the angle of the North Pole, or the variation of the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit? If we can't, there's some serious global cooling ahead.

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