It is odd that we still don't take climate change seriously.

Judging from the acres of newsprint being devoted to the subject right now, you might find that remark surprising. But look at the furore over the University of East Anglia emails: environmentalists hand-wringing as if the end of the world had suddenly been brought forward; their opponents crowing that the whole of climate science has to start again from scratch.

Can you imagine this kind of response if the subject of the emails had been something we actually care about, such as health or the economy? The discovery of the HIV virus involved one of the murkiest incidents in the history of science. It's an insult to UEA's Phil Jones and his colleagues to even suggest the comparison, but it serves to make the point. Reporters on the HIV affair always scrupulously stressed that although the integrity of some of the individuals involved was called into question, the evidence that HIV causes Aids was unaffected. People might have died if the public had been misled on that point. Whereas if it's only about climate change …

A colleague working in astrophysics was expressing bemusement to me yesterday about why the reputation of British science was apparently under threat, given that no evidence had actually emerged of scientific misconduct. Her specific question was: "Has anyone found evidence of an error in a published paper or dataset?" If they had, then of course the error would need to be corrected, which happens in science all the time.

If it could be proved that figures had been deliberately altered to give a specific result then it would be very serious, but so far no evidence has emerged from these Climatic Research Unit (CRU) emails of any error in the HadCRUT instrumental temperature record at the centre of the row, never mind proof of deliberate intent to mislead. How often have you heard that repeated, clearly, by the mainstream press reporting on this incident? Even if they were reporting on Berlusconi's sex life they would be more careful. Berlusconi can afford better lawyers than Jones can.

Take, for example, the "trick" of combining instrumental data and tree-ring evidence in a single graph to "hide the decline" in temperatures over recent decades that would be suggested by a naive interpretation of the tree-ring record. The journalists repeating this phrase as an example of "scientists accused of manipulating their data" know perfectly well that the decline in question is a spurious artefact of the tree-ring data that has been documented in the literature for years, and that "trick" does not mean "deceit". They also know their readers, listeners and viewers won't know this: so why do they keep doing it?

What is particularly ironic is that a favourite graph in the climate sceptic community a few years ago entitled "Most accurate global average temperature" did precisely this. It stitched temperatures from the satellite-based temperature record from 1979 onwards together with the surface temperature record before then. At that time the satellite record showed no evidence of warming, so one might call this a handy trick to hide the recent warming in the surface temperature record. Did that make it evil? I wouldn't say so: there were concerns about the impact of incomplete coverage and something called the urban heat island effect on the surface temperature record, so combining the two data sources might have been legitimate, provided it was clear what was done and why. This particular figure has fallen out of favour since an error was discovered in the satellite data processing which, when corrected, revealed the satellites were actually showing warming after all.

Perhaps the most concrete example of journalists claiming to reveal "problems" with the CRU temperature record was a report on Newsnight (widely redistributed) in which a software engineer criticised computer code contained in the leaked email package. Neither of the two pieces of code Newsnight examined were anything to do with the HadCRUT temperature record at all, which is actually maintained at the Met Office. Newsnight's response, when I challenged them on this, was: "Our expert's opinion is that this is climate change code." Presumably, then, the quality of the code I use to put together problems for our physics undergraduates shows that we should not trust results from my colleagues who work on the Large Hadron Collider on the grounds that "it is all physics code". Newsnight have declined to retract the story.

One can understand the blogosphere reacting as it has done, but why has mainstream journalism collectively decided to treat the story in this way? The bottom line is that journalism deals not in facts, but in "narratives". And the narrative of the fallen idol is clearly a great way to fill the airwaves – witness the reality television industry.

So the narrative journalists have collectively decided upon is that a few scientists may have manipulated their data, and either (a) it doesn't matter because the evidence for human influence on climate is so strong or (b) this shows the whole edifice is now crumbling, depending on their editor's predilections. And George Monbiot laments that the high priests of his climate change religion have let him down. All without any evidence that any number, anywhere, is actually wrong. Journalists, who always find numbers irritating, are revelling in the fact that they are back in the driving seat. By making the story about the individual scientists, rather than scientific results, they can go back to reporting on the story as they see fit without being constrained by scientific evidence.

This is all particularly painful for those of us who know and have the deepest respect for Jones and his colleagues. Our instinct, of course, is to stand up and defend his integrity. But we know that if we do so, journalists weave this into their chosen narrative as "scientists circling the wagons to defend their own". The Times report accompanying the statement released yesterday by UK climate scientists was a case in point: rather than simply reporting the boring story that scientists agree there is nothing wrong with the data after all, they had to go and hunt out a "human interest" angle of some scientist who claimed that he felt pressured by the Met Office into signing the statement (ridiculously – many of us who signed spend our professional lives annoying the Met Office).

Even the senior figures in the World Meteorological Organisation are letting themselves get swept along, pointing out that even if we leave out the CRU dataset the evidence for human influence on climate is still strong. While true, this misses the point. If we allow personal attacks on individual scientists or criticism of irrelevant software to be used as an excuse to discount data that people don't like, it will be open season. Presumably they will be hunting through the emails of someone involved in the Nasa temperature series next, and so it will go on.

None of us can imagine what Phil Jones is going through, and all of us know that it might be our turn next. For all I know someone is already sorting through my emails on a Russian web server. But for the record, if they do decide to pick on me, I don't want people out there defending my integrity. I want people out there defending my results. Because we are scientists, and this is what we do.