Delingpole: Here's what I learnt from the extinction of the golden toad — ecologists have sold out to the religion of global warming

When I was a child — in the days before it became illegal under Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act (1981) and Schedule 2 of the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations (2010) — I was an unlicensed handler of great crested newts.

I loved them for the same reasons, I imagine, Ken Livingstone does: the gorgeous contrast between their rough, matt black bodies and their flame-orange and black-speckled bellies; the way they float in mid-pond as if in suspended animation; watching them develop from their larval stage into efts and then adults; Beatrix Potter’s Sir Isaac Newton…

But this was back in the near vanished age when the natural world was something to be studied and enjoyed for its own sake, rather than viewed through a prism of guilt and self-hatred. In those days, you didn’t need fancy scientific qualifications or government permission to justify your interactions with the animal kingdom. It was simply the mark of a civilised, rounded human being.

So I’ve always been somewhat mystified by this caricature James Delingpole I read about in the bile-spattered comments section of the Guardian’s Environment pages, and on green activist websites and in eco trolls’ tweets. Loathsome, cigar-chomping, Big-Oil-funded arch-capitalist I may be but this is not the fons et origo of my contempt for the environmental movement. No, it’s rooted in something much deeper than that, in two things I gleaned from early childhood: first, an abiding love of nature; second, a belief that if you don’t tell the truth at all times, regardless of how unpopular it makes you, then the bogeyman under your bed will come and eat you.