IT HIT just over a year ago , as ambassadors, ministers and heads of state were preparing to descend on Copenhagen for a climate summit years in the making. The blogosphere, American cable news and, in time, the rest of the media lit up with discussions of a swathe of e-mails from the moderately obscure Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia. A person or persons still unknown had posted this e-mail archive, as well as other computer files from CRU, on to a server in Russia, and sent messages to various climate sceptic blogs designed to tip them off to the treasures therein.

A year on, the shadow of climategate, as it was unhelpfully but inevitably named, remains palpable. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger clearly had it in mind when he recently said “Last year we had a tremendous setback because some of the science and some of the numbers were manipulated and that is very damaging because it gives the other side a way in.” This is a climategate narrative that seems quite popular among many people who, like Schwarzenegger, remain committed to the need for action against global warming—and very popular among people who take the opposite view: that a significant chunk of science had been frankly fraudulent, and that the discovery of this fraud had had a very bad impact on the fight against global warming. Its popularity, though, does not make this story right. Climategate was not about the manipulation of numbers: and the setback for the green cause Mr Schwarzenegger espouses was not climategate, but Copenhagen.

The climategate e-mails led to three inquiries in the United Kingdom. All of them were flawed in different ways. None of them, though, gave credence to the idea that “science and numbers were manipulated”. In a report into those inquiries for Britain's Global Warming Policy Foundation, an organisation opposed to action on climate change and critical of the quality of the science behind that case, Andrew Montford, a blogger with the same predispositions as the Foundation, sums up the principal climategate allegations in a way that shows them to be much more about process than about manipulated findings. He cites an exclusion of sceptical views from the literature; a misrepresentation of primary research, and its uncertainties, in some secondary presentations; a lack of openness to requests for information and a willingness to contravene Britain's freedom of information act; a discordance between what the scientists said in private and what they said in public. Fraud in basic science and primary data of the sort Schwarzenegger spoke of, and which is commonly said to have been revealed, does not make the list.

Alleged flaws—in one case, an expressly alleged fraud—in the scientific work of the CRU researchers and some of those they corresponded with were common currency among critical bloggers well before the emails were leaked. Questions about the validity of reconstructions of mediaeval climate based on treerings, about why some treerings are taken to be good records of temperature at some points in history but not in the recent past, about cherry-picking of data, about the traceability or otherwise of Chinese weather station data and so on had all been aired long before. The climategate e-mails offered little if any new information that might move these debates on in either direction.

What they offered was colour—catchphrases like “hide the decline”—and context. There was clear evidence of circled wagons, shared distaste for the scientist's critics, and unwillingness to conform to the quite high standards of opennness that the freedom of information act—and the ideals of their calling—seek to impose on scientists. A lot—lost, indeed—of science would look just the same if its privacy were similarly breached (and many other areas of human endeavour would look as bad or worse); but to accept that this is the way of world does ittle to minimise the damage. People do not want to believe that scientific knowledge of high and lasting value is messy and human in the making; scientific culture does its best to insulate then from that belief. The middle of a media storm is not the place to wheel out sociologists and historians who might educate them on the subject.

So there was a pervasive impression of disrepute. And there was evidence of the sort of secrecy that often has something to hide. These factors came to colour everything else—and thus to lead to a world where it is widely thought there was lots of fraud and manipulation going on. If there had been straightforward fraud things might, in fact, have been simpler. The most notable flat out scientific fraud in recent years was that of Jan Hendrik Schon, who made up data about single molecule semiconductors. He was found out and disgraced, papers were retracted by journals, souls were searched about how he got away with it: and physics went on. Climategate had no such catharsis, because it revealed no sin so heinous.

Climategate did not materially effect the outcome of Copenhagen. The reasons that the countries which met there could not agree had everything to do with diplomacy, politics and economics. They had absolutely nothing to do with what people in the room thought about the probity of a particular subset of climate science.

What climategate changed was the response that came after. For those disappointed by the results, climategate provided a focus for displaced recrimination—something to blame. Doubt about climate change has regularly been helped along by concerted campaigns, and the climategate looked like more of the same. After all, no fraud had been found—but look! The media was all over it! And Copenhagen failed! Conspiracy!

Then there were climate action's fairweather friends. In general people don't like to be associated with losers, and in Copenhagen the case for strong climate action spectacularly failed to get its preferred result. In this light, an increasing post-climategate tolerance for doubts about warming among the media and some politicians can be read, with just a little cynicism, as people making tactical use of climategate to distance themselves from an agenda they had once thought popular but which now looked increasingly lifeless.

And what of those who were happy Copenhagen had failed? For them, climategate was a more comforting reason for that failure than the real ones. Copenhagen did not fail because governments didn't want action on the climate, or even because no one is willing to take any action. It failed because they all wanted other countries to take more and different actions than the other countries would agree to. For people who don't want there ever to be action, though, it is obviously happier to think that the case had been undermined by some dodgy emails than to recognise than that it still stood—and indeed still stands—but had simply failed to compel action.

This reaction can be seen in its strongest form in American politics. For the Republican party, and for those voting for it, it is no longer necessary to argue about climate change. It has become acceptable to simply ignore it, professing some mixture of doubt, bafflement and apathy. Don't we all know that the climate thing is over?

But though this looks like a reaction to climategate, and to flaws in the products and processes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, those factors are, again, the sizzle not the steak. At its heart this too is a response to Copenhagen, and the subsequent lack of momentum on climate action, and the administration's inability to do anything about it. The case for action currently feels so weak that it can be held off with a flat palm of refusal-to-engage. Perceptions of climategate doubtless make that stance easier to hold. But they aren't its underlying cause.