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.