Forget the emails that basically prove nothing, except to give the science and common sense deniers something to go crazy over. That wasn’t enough to give the current climate change controversy the famous “gate” suffix. But now we have something new happening; something that takes us back to the origins of the “gate” suffix:

Attempts have been made to break into the offices of one of Canada’s leading climate scientists, it was revealed yesterday. The victim was Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and a key contributor to the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In one incident, an old computer was stolen and papers were disturbed.

In addition, individuals have attempted to impersonate technicians in a bid to access data from his office, said Weaver. The attempted breaches, on top of the hacking of files from British climate researcher Phil Jones, have heightened fears that climate-change deniers are mounting a campaign to discredit the work of leading meteorologists before the start of the Copenhagen climate summit tomorrow.

In the memory of Watergate we now can officially call this climategate. This whole thing started with someone breaking the law, so now more people have decided that being criminals is the way to go. Hopefully they all get caught and spend a little time in the climate of prison.