From reports of “suspect packages” to “militant infiltrators”, to the unalloyed joys of aeronautical flight, the real “silly season” seemed to have begun in earnest when the media got its hands on the Camp for Climate Action. Anyone staying at the camp last week as I did was exposed to a bizarre parallel universe in print – one apparently untroubled by the details of the universe inhabited by the rest of us.

One extraordinary Times leader provides a rather good example. Aviation, the writers gush, “has a unique claim to have changed the world for the better”; mass air travel apparently being “the everyday miracle of our age.” Commenting on a protest camp formed in response to a huge proposed expansion of the airport in question, the writers manage to state that “aviation emissions are near the top of every major party’s policy agenda” – even if the news has yet to reach the Cabinet.

As for the protestors – oh dear. The article repeats the spurious allegations levelled by the Evening Standard about plans to leave suspect packages at the airport (what has happened to these stories, incidentally?), and boldly asserts that “The moment the Heathrow activists resort to cutting through perimeter fences … they will bring the airport to a standstill”. How exactly this latter process works is left to the imagination.

The writers conclude that “The environmentally-concerned majority would be more impressed by cogent arguments for more efficient engines”; a point later taken up by Tim Hames, also himself a Times leader-writer. Gazing into his crystal ball, Hames is absolutely assured of two things: “low-cost travel of the sort that has become familiar in the past decade,” he writes, “will not be reinvented every decade hence, and so will not be sustained”; whereas “technological innovation by the [aviation] industry … has already been substantial and there is every incentive for the airlines to continue to clean up further and faster”.

He doesn’t name any such incentives, of course, though the most obvious is the usual one in matters of business: profit. An (entirely speculative) increase in the fuel-efficiency of aircraft will have the obvious effect of pushing prices down, naturally increasing passenger numbers. The Government’s own White Paper on aviation notes in no uncertain terms that “as people get wealthier, they can afford to travel further and more often”; and “[i]n the case of aviation this trend has been amplified by technological advances …” (p. 21; my italics).

So we are asked to abandon the opinions of “[m]ost serious analysts”, and instead put our complete faith in two mutually contradictory ideas: that costs cannot possibly continue to be reduced, while aircrafts’ fuel-efficiency cannot but continue to increase. Alternatively, of course, passenger numbers could easily be quelled by seriously restricting airport capacity; but (surprise, surprise) Hames unequivocally defends the expansion of Heathrow – so that option, it would seem, is scuppered. Surely, one thinks, it can’t get any more daft than this.

Well, don’t speak too soon. For in a discussion of supposed “militants” at the Climate Camp, the Telegraph’s Richard Alleyne provides online listeners with this wonderful nugget of informative commentary (available on this page):

“I think the militants are probably in the minority … but inevitably among [the Climate Campers] I’m sure there’ll be some hard-core elements, and, er, they probably won’t be, even, at this camp, but they’re probably at this moment planning to somehow get involved with the protest in some way, er, and cause, probably, more disruption …”

Insightful stuff. The “militants” are probably/inevitably (take your pick) among the climate campers – though paradoxically they’re not actually present at the camp. Which rather raises the question, in what possible position is Alleyne to comment on them? And what elements of his speculative commentary – hedged with complete uncertainty as it is – could not be gleaned from, say, a conversation in your nearest pub?

People will continue to commit atrocities, as Voltaire once put it, as long as they believe absurdities. And – as even the briefest glimpse at coverage of the Climate Camp demonstrates – no-one does absurdity quite like the British press.