Carbon Brief – a green propaganda outlet, lavishly funded by the European Union – has produced a map depicting the world’s most influential environmental campaigners and the world’s most dangerous deniers.

In the former category, it’s no surprise that tragic bear-rape victim and private-jet-setting eco-crusader Leo DiCaprio comes top of the list.

And in the latter?

It gives me no small pleasure to tell you that I, James Delingpole, am depicted sitting dangerously close to the very epicentre of the global nexus of pure denialist evil.

Only a handful of names come higher up the list of (alleged) green shame, among them the great Steve Goddard (aka Tony Heller) of the Real Science blog, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and Marc Morano of Climate Depot. I’m also proud to be in the company of Allen West and Ron Paul who, for some odd reason, appears to have found his way into the denier category.

The rankings aren’t definitive. They are based on Twitter activity on a particular day earlier this year when DiCaprio had just bleated in his Oscar speech about climate change being the worst thing evah — which explains the otherwise inexplicable presence in the lists of people not generally known for playing a part in the climate change debate.

Beyond humbled by this recognition. #TheRevenant shows the beauty of nature. Help protect it https://t.co/iGQ2c9fmEn pic.twitter.com/bTOrhF15RY — Leonardo DiCaprio (@LeoDiCaprio) February 29, 2016

Ellie Goulding, for example.

The singer of Starry Eyes features prominently on the list simply because, being an international pop star she has lots of Twitter followers, and happened to retweet DiCaprio’s tweet.

But anyway, let’s get back to the main point which is that I am now officially one of the top ten most powerful voices in the entire denialist universe.

This was never the plan, I must admit, when I graduated from Oxford with my degree in English Language and Literature.

Really, what I would have much preferred would have been to have become a millionaire Master of Foxhounds or a Pablo Escobar drugs kingpin or the man who broke the world record for the most supermodels shagged in one year.

Unfortunately, in life you have to play the cards you’re dealt.

The hand life dealt me, as a journalist, was to shove right under my nose one of the most important stories – and probably the single biggest scandal – of our generation.

Much as I’d like a break from writing about environmentalism and climate change I can never take one because the stories keeping coming and if I don’t cover them hardly anyone else will because most of the people in my trade are either too ill-informed or too scared to take on Big Green.

Imagine a conspiracy so vast that it embraces everyone from the world’s most famous bear-rape victim movie star (see above) to Bono and Thom Yorke out of Radiohead to NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, NOAA, the Royal Society to the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale to the BBC, ABC, CNN, CNBC, the Discovery Channel and the Disney Channel to the United Nations and the European Union to the Dalai Lama and the Pope to all the world’s big corporations (and that includes the oil industry), insurance companies and mega-banks to pretty much the entire political class barring a few mavericks.

If it existed it would be the biggest story ever, right?

Well you’d think but actually the conspiracy does exist. Yet even though it’s so flagrant that none of the participants bothers to hide their role in it, the number of media outlets covering the story accurately and honestly is tiny.

There are various reasons for this, one of which I shall be covering in my next article, which will concern the scandal of the Putrid Peers who tried to greenmail The Times newspaper into abandoning its honest coverage of climate issues. Seriously, this is the kind of shit you can imagine going on in Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China, but not in a liberal democracy where freedom of the press is supposed to be paramount.

That’s why I call the climate change story the “gift that goes on giving.” Because that’s what it is. If only more people in my trade did their homework, I might never have made the global deniers’ big time list.

So I’d like to conclude my Top Denier acceptance speech by thanking 99.99 per cent of my contemporaries in the media for being so totally effing useless at their jobs. Guys, it’s thanks to your criminal incompetence that I’m up here collecting this award today!