Fairy stories

Not long before Independent Political Bloggers came into being, I posted a piece about Johann Hari's desperate climate journalism at my own blog. If you've not read Hari, you'll need to know that by comparison, George Monbiot is a paragon of measured journalism and climate sanity.

Hari's pronouncements on climate have always been inane to the point of ridicule and like Al Gore, Charlie Windsor and Chris Huhne, he wasted no effort or jet fuel in visiting the Arctic, the Maldives and Tuvalu to tell us - without a hint of self-knowledge or irony - that jetting off to far-off lands for our pathetic, self-indulgent holidays was destroying Mother Earth.

His articles could have been written by the gullible wee work-experience lass interning at Greenpeace that particular week. In view of the information that came out of yesterday's Twitterstorm, perhaps they were.

And given his capacity for fiction and imagination, perhaps he never went to those places whose climate miseries he described so eloquently? His source material could well have come from the PR machines at the WWF, FoE and Greenpeace - and, as Dan Hannan has recently reported, Greenpeace are liars.

Private Eye accused Hari of placing fictional content into factual pieces as long ago as 2003: it looks as though little has changed since then.

In the circumstances, it would be interesting to know which qualities have so impressed the Independent and the BBC since Hari was a mere 23 and whether they are the same qualities that have resulted in him being voted one of the twenty most influential gay people in the world.

We can only hope (but not too hard) that he hasn't embarrassed all those literary prize-givers whom he has fooled into showering him with glory over his illustrious career.

Time Traveller blogs at Adventures in Time Travel.