What made the ACORN-exposing work of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles so sensational was that they successfully infiltrated the habitats of the subjects they investigated, and observed their routine behaviors. They didn’t have to coerce or pressure the ACORN office workers to say or do things they did not want to do. It wasn’t “60 Minutes,” but it reflected the new paradigm under cable TV news and Web rules. James and Hannah were like computer hackers walking in the front door and literally being given what they wanted.

So now an actual hacker — or an insider — has exposed something similar in the global warming activism realm: scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (regarded as Britain’s top authority) caught in behaviors they would never want the outside world to see. Marc Morano at Climate Depot is developing the link archive and Australian reporter Andrew Bolt is harvesting revelatory remarks from emails and documents, as he explains:

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

This is clearly not the work of some hacker, but of an insider who’s now blown the whistle.

The clogosphere (climate blogs) is awash in this story (again, see Climate Depot). Even if this isn’t your issue, you ought to at least spend a little time this weekend (all us politico-infojunkies still get our fixes on Saturdays, right?) perusing what Bolt has unearthed. Amazing stuff which Chris Horner says could be alarmism’s “blue dress moment.” As Bolt notes, it’s not just the East Anglians — it’s the foremost global warmer scientists from all over, caught. Wow.