Kittens!

Please meet the newest additions to our family, Margot (tabby) and Rita (black), named for our house signature cocktail ??

It's my first time having pets. My partner grew up with them, so she's very much the boss. Obviously, we've immediately fallen in love with them ??

And so have all our friends. Pets is one of those things that people just love to talk about in the UK (and lots of other places too). It's a topic of conversation that makes us smile and feel all warm and fuzzy.

There are quite a few other topics of conversation that fit this mould as well. Sport is an obvious one - not everyone is sporty (and not everyone has pets), but most people are into following or practicing at least one sport. It's a great opener for getting to know someone.

TV is another one - although it perhaps has less cultural power than in the past, when everyone only had a few channels to choose from and we were more likely to watch the same stuff, compared the near-infinite options available today across a plethora of streaming channels.

But I think the only one that comes close to pets for smiles and fuzzy feelings is holidays. The phrase "anywhere nice" is a staple of the British vocabulary. "Been anywhere nice lately?" "Going anywhere nice this summer?" It's heard thousands of times a day in pubs and hairdessers, around the water cooler and over the lunch table, up and down the country.

Instagram and dating apps are full of holiday snaps - bikinis on beaches, hikes up hills, and so on. Our holidays are a way that we develop and express our identities, and a way of deepening social connections with our friends, colleagues and people we fancy.

And a lot of holidays (although far from all) involve flying. When you think about it, airports and airplanes are deeply weird places, where we have singular experiences. We submit our bags and our bodies to be x-rayed, when we would howl about infringements of civil liberties if anyone tried that on us in our normal lives.

We meander through Duty-free, a glitzy glossy shopping experience with NO TAX. In the airport, there are no homeless people, there is no suffering, there is no politics. The opening and closing scenes of Love Actually, with hugs and kisses aplenty as friends and family reunite, would have you believe that the airport is the secular temple of love in the 21st century. Heathrow couldn't possibly ask for better PR than that.

On board the plane, the "whoosh" physically pushes us back into our seat backs as the plane accelerates for takeoff, like a rollercoaster. We breathe recycled air in a hermetically sealed cabin. We look out the window to see the world as God does, and we marvel at the miraculous defiance of gravity, with just a few feet or even millimetres separating us from the sky.

For many people, being able to go on holiday is what they save up for. It is both why they go to work, and how they escape from work. And in our increasingly connected world, aviation keeps us close to our far flung friends and family.

This is a powerful foundation for the industry, whose marketing plays on our emotions to sell more flights, and whose PR convinces us that aviation is a force for good in the world. The public image of aviation is partly based on its intrinsic characteristics, and partly generated by the industry, from Blue Monday promotions through to the very psychogeography of the airport experience.

All of this is to say that, like with our pets, our connection to flying is an intensely emotional one, rather than a rational one. Any perceived attack on flying will likely trigger a hostile reaction, just like any attack on our pets. It's a part of what defines us. Even if we don't fly very often (and let's not forget, most people don't), many of us still feel that emotional connection. It can even be more special because of how rare it is - although research shows that the more people fly, the more they feel they haven't travelled enough in the world, which sounds a bit like an addiction (another non-rational phenomenon).

When I'm at the pub or around the lunch table, it's funny how my friends and colleagues - who know I work on climate change, and themselves tend to be pretty switched on about it - feel a need to apologise to me, to excuse their flying chat, as if it offends me. To be clear: I think shaming people about their behaviours is a very poor theory of change, and I don't do it. But people offer up their apologies nonetheless, because they know it's mega-polluting. But knowledge enough doesn't change behaviour, when it's emotions we're dealing with.

So for those of us working to bring about a world with no more pollution from planes, let's think really carefully about how we talk to people about it. Let's remember that although the problem may seem abundantly clear and urgent to us, it isn't clear at all to most people. And even when people have the knowledge, emotion will cloud the picture into a fog of cognitive dissonance.

In brief: if you want to win hearts and minds on flying and climate, ask yourself: if I switched the word "flights" for "pets", would it sound reasonable or offensive?

Because no one's taking my cats away from me, I guarantee you that.