In an embarrassing blow to the movement to combat global warming, hackers have posted hundreds of e-mails from a world-renowned British institute that show researchers colluding to exaggerate warming and undermine skeptics.

University of East Anglia officials confirmed the Climate Research Unit’s e-mails were hacked, but were unable to confirm the veracity of posted content, according to British and American news reports. Skeptics of human-caused warming, who note temperatures appear to have stopped climbing, called the news explosive.

“This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud,” climatologist Patrick J. Michaels told the New York Times [NYT]

The Times contacted researchers who confirmed they had sent or received some of the most damning e-mails, including a discussion of how to use a “trick” to configure scientific data to “hide the decline.”

“It does look incriminating on the surface,” Bob Ward, a climate change expert at the London School of Economics, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, though he said it may not be so sinister. “Scientists say ‘trick’ not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick.”

The e-mail authors also refer to skeptics as “idiots,” fantasize in one case about beating up a skeptic, and discuss ways to prevent skeptics’ papers from being published, London’s Daily Telegraph reported