But I have skedaddled ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning.

Suppressing (but only just) my bright green Glasgow Envy of my prime minister about to visit one of my favourite cities, I continue my occasional series of suggestions to him of what he must see and do while in that characterful city.

He is to go there, dragging his heels, to tokenly attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP26. But we know that the conference itself will not interest him very much since he believes that if there is climate change, it is being changed by God and that He, God, knows best.

So, ScoMo, (may I call you 'ScoMo'?) once ensconced in Glasgow, why not do a little slippery boycotting of the funny little conference so as to experience the greater Glasgow?

Slip away from your inner city hotel (perhaps disguised as a kilt-wearing Scotsman, lest journalists catch you wagging the conference). Taking a number 77 bus, go out to the fabulous Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

One of its must-see treasures, especially for an ultra-Christian like you (although this agnostic columnist, too, was left quite dizzy by it) is Salvador Dali's painting Christ of St John of the Cross.

The celebrity artwork (it even has its own purpose-built gallery inside Kelvingrove) is an indescribably surreal but reverent depiction of the crucifixion of Our Redeemer. Dali said the idea of the painting came to him in "a cosmic dream".

Scomo, mate, you'll be bedazzled by it. It may give you a new appreciation of Jesus and you may even ask yourself (and this is my stealthy agenda in sending you to see it) why your heartless political style (for example, why are you ignoring the plight of Julian Assange?) makes shamefully few imitations of Christ's gentle, humane and merciful ways.

Yes, I see you at Kelvingrove standing wide-eyed and kilt-wearing in front of the surrealist's epic masterpiece, marvelling "How good is Salvador Dali!"

Meanwhile here in Australia it is National Bird Week. And as if to mark and celebrate it (and as if Nature has intervened to take one's mind off the cro-magnon Nationals' climate attitudes) a Tawny Frogmouths' nest in my bird-blessed neighbourhood is suddenly decorated with two impossibly strange nestlings.

I say ''strange'' because there is a dear weirdness about the species with its evolved disguise and camouflage and stock-still posture enabling it to fool its predators by looking like a stump of dead wood on the tree where it poses.

In a recent column, I employed climate science statistics and a chilling new piece of science fiction, Karen Russell's The Ghost Birds, to agonise over the horrific possibility that searing climate change may ere long bereave Australia's federal capital city, for now the most bird-blessed city in the world, of all of its birds.

Having last week used some make-believe (Karen Russell's story, in which bird-loving mankind is reduced to birdwatching extinct birds' ghosts) to leave you despairing, I this time leap to make make-believe amends. So I point to a fine, illustrated-by-the-author piece, Birds Of Tomorrow, for the New Yorker in which Jenny Croik imagines new bird species. For her they are species that have evolved, smart adaptations so as to survive and rise above climate change.

So for example her Temporal Warbler "has a unique adaptation to the inhospitable environment of Earth: they secrete tachyon particles from their chest feathers, thus opening a time portal to a 19th-century garden, where they feed on seeds and small insects". Her Interstellar Albatross has "a special pouch adapted for breathing in space, enabling these giant birds to periodically leave Earth and wander through space for decades of their long lives".

Of the Freon-Rumped Eider she reports, "These sea ducks of the Arctic adapted to the loss of their icy habitat by evolving a special Freon gland that allows them to create their own ice sheets on the go."

The climate plight of our planet and its animal species is heartbreaking. And yet, the kinds of adaptations shown by our very own frogmouths (over 30 million years, experts say) and by Jenny Croik's birds of tomorrow offers the potentially heartmending dream that long after undeserving Homo sapiens and Homo Nationals are gone and forgotten, some deserving bird species will have adapted, survived, even flourished.