SCENES so perfectly allegorical this week that a scriptwriter couldn't have improved them.

In Glasgow, the city entire and its environs are suffering from a collective cricked neck following the visit of Emirate's A380, gliding over Linwood and settling on a Glasgow Airport runway as a piper played, ignoring the risk of startling it away.

The world’s largest commercial passenger aircraft and, despite the fact it's flown into Glasgow before, the excitement was real. I hold my hands up. I was like a kid at Christmas.

I adore flying, I do too much of it. People complain about the process, how we've taken the miracle of flight and sapped the joy out of it but I disagree. I love every bit of it, from pointlessly squeezing my liquids into a clear plastic bag to squeezing myself into a budget airline seat.

The enforced idleness is worth the ticket price alone. So, if I hadn't been felled by a migraine on Tuesday evening, a less pleasant form of forced idleness, I would have been down at the side of the motorway near Glasgow Airport also tipping up my chin to watch the A380 sail in.

And who could blame us, the fans of the Big Bird? As a species we get very excited about large items. Look at Australia's Big Things. The Big Banana at Coffs Harbour; the Big Prawn in Ballina; the Big Potato in Robertson; Glenrowan's Big Ned Kelly. Around 150 very large objects dotted around the country and people go to see them. People travel for miles to see a Big Galahs, of course they're going to like to look at a really big aeroplane.

I mean, it flies, for a start. A miracle of man's invention.

Who could blame us? Well, across on the east coast, more than 1000 climate change protesters taking over parts of Edinburgh city centre could blame us.

While we salivated over an environmental wrecking ball, Extinction Rebellion, the nearly new but rapidly ubiquitous activist group, blockaded the North Bridge. In London, hundreds of arrests have been made as Extinction Rebellion promises to cause disruption in the capital city with protestors glueing themselves to pavements, Docklands Light Railway and Jeremy Corbyn's front gate.

Your average person on the street might not be able to tell you, but the group's aim is to push the UK government to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025. The group also wants a citizens’ assembly established to work out an emergency plan of action to tackle climate breakdown and biodiversity loss.

There is, plainly, work to be done to win over the general public and, as much or more pressingly, the media. Google "Airbus A380 & carbon emissions & Glasgow Airport" and you'll get plenty of results - with the caveat underneath each of your returned searches, "Missing: 'carbon emissions'."

While the earth is being crippled to the point of inhospitableness, we were busy reporting uncritically on a giant passenger plane, as if air travel is an entirely unproblematic endeavour not at odds with our carbon emissions targets. At least the coverage of the new Caledonian Sleeper is less problematic, given that we want more train travel as an environmental solution.

As us plane fans were looking up in delight, Extinction Rebellion must have been looking on in despair. The question is one of how to persuade everyone to the same page on what is - for varied and complex reasons - a divisive issue.

Extinction Rebellion's Robin Boardman-Pattison was featured in the press this week after an appearance on Sky News. The 21-year-old felt the ire of the right, having his £17,500-a-year private school and Italian holidays cited as reasons he couldn't be trusted as a reliable source on climate change.

Of course, had he gone to his local comp and never left Bristol, he'd be viewed as some untrustworthy hippy type.

Broadcaster Adam Boulton put it to Mr Boardman-Pattison that he is part of the "incompetent middle-class, self-indulgent people and you want to tell us how to live our lives."

While a majority of people understand that we need radical and urgent change to arrest climate change, people don't want to be chided or patronised; they feel despair at the size of the issue; they want structural change over eschewing plastic straws; they don't want to be inconvenienced. A surprising number of people appreciate the urgency of tackling climate change until their bus route's disrupted.

But then, there is a distinct irony, that will be felt by London commuters, in protesting about the importance of public transport while making public transport more difficult and less pleasant to use.

This number, 3.5 per cent, is given as the proportion of a population that have to come together to support a peaceful mass movement for it to effect change. It doesn't seem an awful lot yet, with the mixed response to Extinction Rebellion while so many of us are gazing at a gas guzzling plane, it does.

Yet, in more positive news, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, has come out in support of environmental activism, writing in a broadsheet newspaper that the financial sector must be at the heart of tackling climate change.

Mr Carney writes in a language the financial community understands, threatening profits. This stage of a rebellion is for building support; the message has to be communicated in a way people understand and relate to. Otherwise, would-be allies will be too distracted by larger, shinier objects elsewhere.