Scotland is celebrated worldwide for her natural beauty.
Her wild glens and moors.
Her deep lochs.
Her rugged mountains and magnificent coastline.
It's hard to imagine man has made any impact at all.
But every square inch has been affected by centuries of human activity.
I'm going to look at how man made Scotland's landscape
and how this history has shaped the present.
This week, the climate.
We've been shaped by it, struggled to understand it,
and now we're even changing it.
This is Whitelee Wind Farm.
It's the biggest onshore wind farm in Europe.
140 turbines spread across Eaglesham Moor, just to the south of Glasgow.
Every one of these turbines can generate enough power for 1,000 homes in the city below.
Across Scotland there are currently 70 more wind farms and another 200 are planned to follow.
They will transform our landscape and will eventually supply
over half the wind power of the entire United Kingdom,
but they are more than mere electricity generators.
These wind turbines are frontline soldiers in the battle against climate change.
They are an attempt to use Scotland's natural landscape to combat the threat of global warming.
Today, concern and debate about global warming grips the world,
but it's a spectre that we have done this to ourselves that really haunts us.
Its our addiction to carbon-based fossil fuels that's blamed.
In many ways that addiction was kick started right here in Scotland.
In the centuries of the industrial revolution, it was Scottish
engineers and entrepreneurs who let the carbon genie out of the bottle.
Today, these turbines represent the latest twist in the dramatic story
of Scotland's relationship with the climate.
A story that's seen the people and landscape shaped, not just by human forces,
but by natural ones too, for thousands of years.
During the winter of 1850, a great storm raged across Orkney.
It tore away the grass from a large dune known as Skara Brae.
Beneath the sand, the ruins of ancient stone buildings were revealed,
and provided a clue to how past changes in climate
transformed not only lives, but entire societies.
As archaeologists began digging, they soon realised that the storm had uncovered
the best-preserved Neolithic village in northern Europe.
You know, it's extraordinary to think that people lived,
loved and died here centuries before construction began at Stonehenge.
This much we know,
but there's mystery here too.
When archaeologists were excavating the stones of Skara Brae,
they discovered something intriguing in the rubbish.
Seeds of wheat.
For seeds of wheat to grow you need long, warm summers -
not too wet, not too windy,
Not what you usually find on Orkney.
Today, winds of 90mph regularly rip across the island
and it's around two degrees colder than the Scottish lowlands.
If wheat grew here 5,000 years ago, the climate must have been different
- both warmer and less stormy than it is now.
And there's more. Further archaeological excavations
found mounds of shellfish and cod bones
and, on an island stripped of trees today,
signs of clusters of birch, hazel and willow,
woods that would have sheltered red deer and boar.
This must have been an island paradise.
The archaeological record begins to vanish around 4,000 years ago,
and shows no signs of struggle, or conquest, no wreckage or skeletons.
Instead, it seems, idyllic Skara Brae was voluntarily abandoned.
The question is why?
One way to understand what happened to the people of Skara Brae
4,000 years ago is to come here, to this loch.
Loch Inch, in the Cairngorm Mountains.
Here, scientists like Professor Mary Edwards have a way
of travelling back to the time of Skara Brae - travelling in mud.
The sediments here are a kind of diary.
And if you know how to read them they reveal much about the past.
I always get a real kick out of realising that
these lake bed sediments are archives of the past.
It's like seeing the past emerge.
Do you get a kick out of this moment?
You're never sure what you'll get until you extrude it in this way.
It's very surprising you get very excited, and you want to poke it and
prod it and see if there's anything catches your eye.
Its fascinating. At what point were the pharaohs building the pyramids and when was Skara Brae?
That's right. It's fascinating.
What kind of indicators are there in here? A lot of different ones.
Pollen, obviously for vegetation,
little seeds perhaps or bits of plant material might be in there.
Things like that. Bits of wood even, washed off the shore.
We can see volcanic ash layers that are derived from big eruptions in Iceland
that blow across the Atlantic and it's pretty well known when they occurred
so they actually give you time moments.
Then, as you move through, you start to see further changes.
You'll see it's pretty warm, pretty nice, things were growing well
and then the climate just starts to tip towards being not so good,
some quite serious decline in the general climate
and some quite strong climate events.
Adding information from mud cores like these with the archaeological evidence
reveals that the people of Skara Brae experienced one of these climate events.
Today, the average temperature in Scotland just over seven degrees.
Between 4,000 BC and 3,000 BC Scotland enjoyed a warmer climatic period
when temperatures were a couple of degrees higher than they are today.
But then temperatures began to sink by two degrees,
two degrees that would have made a significant difference.
Stormy winters.
Wet summers.
Failed crops.
Famines.
The idyll of Skara Brae was shattered by climate change.
The cores go on to tell what happened next.
Between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, the temperatures slowly fluctuate.
Then they rise sharply through a mediaeval warm period,
and then they plunge rapidly,
the beginning of a period we now call the Little Ice Age.
Starting in the 14th century, the Little Ice Age was around two to
three degrees cooler than today and lasted for 500 years,
an interval that brought not just snow but storms as well,
some of the worst storms ever recorded.
So bad that their effects are still visible on the landscape today.
Culbin Sands on the north-east coast of Scotland is a remarkable
landscape of sand dunes that hold Britain's largest coastal forest.
Long before the forest was planted in the 1930s,
the bare dunes stretched far inland,
where they concealed something even more remarkable...
rolling farmland.
Under the roots of this forest are the remnants of a great house,
and its fertile fields and orchards. A land flowing with milk and honey,
which disappeared in its entirety during the course of a single night.
That night in late 1694, a huge storm struck from the north.
A report from the time tells of hurricane force winds at sea.
On land, this shore bore the full brunt of its violence.
Sand was blasted from the beach, across the fields, covering everything in its path.
It was a weather event so extraordinary that it was recorded
by a witness, one John Martin of nearby Elgin, who wrote,
"The wind comes rushing down through openings between the hills,
"carrying with it an immense torrent of sand,
"with a force and violence almost overpowering."
It's said that the storm lasted for 30 hours. When the villagers returned the following day,
they found their homes buried and their fields a sandy wasteland.
An area of farmland that was so fertile it was known as the Granary of Moray
was lost forever.
The great Culbin Dunes are still accumulating sand,
but today the trees act as the sand's anchors
pinning it to the coast, where it belongs.
All of this, the legacy of one very stormy night during the Little Ice Age.
The people of Culbin Sands looked for answers,
and they found the explanation in their own behaviour, in the acts of man.
In this case, one particular man - their laird, Alexander Kinnaird.
It was said he played cards on the Sabbath -
was in league with the devil.
The storm had been God's punishment for his sins.
There was more divine punishment to come as the Little Ice Age reached the peak of its terrible power.
The years following 1694 brought more hurricane force winds and numbing cold.
Thousands died, thousands more left the country.
There were reports of the poor roaming across the countryside,
desperately seeking food and charity.
Many starved, dying where they fell,
unburied bodies littering the roads and fields.
When these victims of the weather sought spiritual comfort,
they received just condemnation.
Scotland's ministers stood before their congregations preached hellfire and damnation,
because this was a biblical famine,
a clear sign of God's fury, a just punishment for a sinful nation.
This is a flavour of the cold comfort dished out at the time,
"The wrath and displeasure of God is visible against us
"in the unkindly cold whereby God threatens to blast
"our expectations and hopes of the fruits of the earth."
Hellfire and damnation was cold comfort indeed.
The inhabitants of Culbin were as ignorant as those of Skara Brae
about the real causes of their misfortune.
They were unaware that it was the entirely natural rhythms
of the earth's orbit, volcanic explosions,
and the behaviour of the sun that was controlling the climate.
They would also have been unaware that the world was on the cusp of
a period of technological change...
..that would see a new climactic force,
the influence of man.
At the birth of that process was a handful of bright, industrious Scots.
This picture illustrates one of the great fables from the history of science.
It's 1751 and in a Greenock kitchen a 15-year-old boy
sits watching a kettle. Watching and thinking.
The boy is James Watt.
In the picture, he's regarded kindly by his aunt.
His cousin tells a different story.
"Jamie Watt, I never saw such an idle boy.
"For the last hour you have spoken not one word,
"just taken the lid off that kettle and put it on again,
"holding now a cup, now a silver spoon above the steam,
"watching how it rises out of the spout
"and catching and counting the drops of hot water."
Of course, we all know now that this was no idle dreamer.
Young James stored away his observations and years later
he designed a new condensing boiler that made steam engines more powerful and more efficient.
It kick-started the industrial revolution.
Steam engines drove pistons, cranks and trains.
Drove belts and looms and lathes.
The number of factories exploded,
connected by a web of railways.
Steam was the driver,
but it was all fuelled by this - coal.
Coal is fascinating stuff.
It's hard to believe its the fossilised remains
of long-buried forests from 300 million years ago.
It's almost pure carbon.
In a way, this material is like the alchemist's stone.
It's transformed the fortunes of those who owned it.
Industries, even cities, have been built on this.
It certainly transformed Scotland.
James Watt's invention helped to create a huge demand for coal.
At the end of the 18th century, one and a half million tons of coal were extracted every year in Scotland.
By 1870, that figure was 17 million tons.
The central belt contained one of the richest seams in Britain,
and the heartland of the Scottish coal industry was soon established all around my home town.
Glasgow.
In the 19th century, Glasgow was a boom town.
It resonated to the sounds of the industrial revolution,
the clank of metal, the roar of machines.
It was a city full of smokestacks pumping out noxious fumes.
The tallest of them all was the St Rollox chimney.
Built in 1842, it was 400 feet tall
and was known locally as Tennant's Stalk.
It was named after Charles Tennant the Scottish industrialist,
founder of the St Rollox chemical works,
which by the middle of the 19th century
was the biggest chemical plant in the world.
And was using 30,000 tons of coal every year.
Industrialists like Tennant generated huge profits and vast numbers of jobs.
And he wasn't alone.
There were dozens of Tennants, hundreds of factories,
using millions of tons of coal. They transformed Glasgow,
turned it into the workshop of the world, the second city of the Empire.
But this furious transformation came at a price.
Pollution gave Glaswegians one of the lowest life expectancies in Britain.
And while the effects of that pollution on people and on buildings was plain to see,
its effect on the atmosphere was not.
This beautiful loch, up in the Galloway forest, is miles from anywhere.
For generations the water's been popular with local fishermen.
At the end of the 19th century, the fish, mainly brown trout,
had almost entirely disappeared from the lochs around here.
Those that remained were horribly deformed,
often with half a tail or fins missing.
Various theories were offered up,
a favourite being that the fish scraped themselves against the sharp bedrock.
But it wasn't the rocks that were causing the deformities.
It was pollution.
Noxious pollutants that were being pumped from the coal-fired engines
of Northern Ireland, Northern England and Scotland.
Gases like sulphur dioxide.
When these emissions made contact with water in the atmosphere,
sulphur dioxide turned into sulphuric acid.
They fell as acid rain in the lochs of southwest Scotland.
And the fish? The fish were poisoned and deformed.
These lochs have been collecting pollutants since the start of the industrial revolution.
The water had become acidic as early as 1800, the fires of distant industry to blame.
The moral of the story is simple.
What goes up must come down.
That's heavy weather.
Heavy weather indeed,
and a forewarning that human activity could alter the atmosphere.
Sulphur dioxide wasn't the only gas being released by burning coal.
There were others,
including an invisible and odourless gas.
One that occurs naturally in the atmosphere,
and is also created when the carbon in coal burns on contact with oxygen in the air.
Carbon dioxide.
By the middle of the 19th century, carbon dioxide was being released from coal like never before,
and thanks to another Scot,
would soon be released from another vital natural resource - oil.
James Watt gave the world power,
James Young gave the world light.
Born in Glasgow in 1811,
James Young was a chemist and an entrepreneur.
Young literally greased the wheels of industry,
supplying lubricants to mills and factories.
But his supply of oil was running out,
so he turned his inventive mind to finding a new source.
It looks as though we'd have to make oil for ourselves.
Make oil for ourselves?
My plan is to get the oil from coal by distilling it.
A friend sent me some samples a few weeks ago,
which they found near Edinburgh. Here is some of it.
Of course, it'll have to be distilled in a special way.
It may sound improbable
but it was, Young knew, potentially very lucrative indeed.
Young continued to hunt for samples,
and 20 miles from Edinburgh he found just the one he was looking for.
It's called torbanite.
It's a kind of mixture between a coal and an oil shale.
It was first mined just west of Edinburgh at a hill called
Torbane Hill, which is why it's called torbanite,
It's amazing to think that it's this rock that really kick-started
an industry that kept tens of thousands of people in jobs in the central part of Scotland.
Now, to do this I need to get a pestle and mortar
and smash it down a little bit.
You can smell a real... Already there's an oily, diesely smell
as if you're in a petrol station.
That's nice, look at that. A nice clear, bright flame.
What you don't really see here is that there's vapours being given off
and it's the vapours that turned out to be the real important thing.
This is what's called a cold finger condenser.
It's basically a test tube, inside of which is a condenser where cold water runs through.
Pop this on,
set the water off.
And then what I'm going to do is heat it once again,
but this time what it's going to do is the vapour will come off
and condense against the cold water and line the outer side of the condenser.
And then, look at that...
crude oil.
Its amazing to think this simple process was the start of Scotland's oil industry.
Absolutely stinks.
In 1851, James Young opened his first manufacturing plant in West Lothian.
Paraffin for lamps and candles started as a by-product,
but they soon became the most profitable part of his business,
and the wax became renowned for the brilliance of its light.
Young piled up the superlatives.
First holder of a patent for distilling oil from shale.
First commercial oil works in the world.
He piled up his rubbish too.
What was left after the oil had been extracted was collected in these heaps.
It's what I call a carbon footprint.
Others call them bings.
The story goes that there's so much oil in here that it used to seep into the streams below
and the locals used to set it alight.
Close up, the shale pieces looks rather lovely.
There's still a lot of it around, which isn't surprising.
For every ton mined and burned to extract the oil,
80% ended up as waste.
What's astonishing is that the other 20% proved to be so profitable.
For a short while at least, this small patch of Scotland
could honestly call itself the oil capital of the world.
It became the centre of global oil production, where, thanks to Young,
thousands rushed to get in on the oil boom.
And shale oil didn't just burn in lamps.
It would be used to produce a new fuel called petroleum.
Today the shale bings are being used to build roads,
on which we'll drive our petrol fuelled cars...
..quite possibly until all the oil runs out,
and the age of carbon is finally over.
The amazing innovations of people like James Watt and James Young
helped us establish our industrial society upon a finite amount of natural resources,
an age of belief in progress today
with no thought for the consequences tomorrow.
The great Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle captured the spirit of the age best when he wrote,
"We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highway; nothing can resist us.
"We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines,
"come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils."
Spoils indeed.
Foul air, and poisoned people,
polluted rivers, blackened buildings.
And if Watt and Young helped start the age of carbon,
they also ushered in the age of carbon dioxide.
Every tonne of coal burned gave off two tonnes of it.
Every tonne of oil released more than three.
Invisible and odourless, a harmless by-product of industrialisation.
Or was it?
One of the first people to speculate about the effect of carbon dioxide
on the Earth's atmosphere was John Tyndall.
Tyndall was a professor of philosophy at the Royal Institute,
and a keen mountaineer.
On one trip to the mountains, his sharp eyes noticed the tracks left behind by once-vast glaciers.
His sharp mind did the rest.
In 1859, he speculated that, to cause glaciers to melt,
the climate must have changed.
And that one of the gases in the air,
such as carbon dioxide, might well have caused it.
So he set out to test his theory.
Today, using simple laboratory equipment,
we can demonstrate the experiment he conducted.
HISSING
What have we got? What we have is two bottles.
This one just has air in it, and this one has carbon dioxide.
It's been filled up so that it now has
a much higher percentage carbon dioxide content than this one here.
So a miniature atmosphere and a miniature atmosphere enriched with CO2. Absolutely.
An extreme version of what the atmosphere would be like if we keep putting CO2 in it.
So what do we do to kind of...?
We have our sun simulator, we've got this massive light here that'll be the sun,
we're going to shine the light on them, and we should find
the carbon dioxide one heats up much quicker than the air one.
And these are recording the temperature inside?
Absolutely, so the two of these are currently at the same temperature
because we've had them lying around for a little while.
What we've done is we've put the sun in between the two of them,
and the idea is this should heat the two equally.
We try to keep everything as fair as possible.
Shall we turn the sun on? We shall turn the sun on.
In just a few short minutes,
the flask containing more carbon dioxide warms
to become hotter than the flask containing just air,
a full 2.5 degrees.
So that's because the CO2 is holding onto the heat and not letting...
And not letting it back out again.
Today we know John Tyndall's breakthrough as the greenhouse effect.
He proved that carbon dioxide wasn't as innocuous as once believed,
and identified one mechanism by which climate could change.
To him, it was the solution to the past problem of why the mountain glaciers had melted,
yet scientific speculation persisted.
If the climate had changed once, could it change again?
Was the climate now fixed or was it still fluid?
The question begged an answer, but hard facts were thin on the ground.
The climate was one big unknown.
Records were either patchy or non-existent.
Into this scientific void stepped a group of intrepid Victorian meteorologists.
Men like Clement Wragge.
Wragge worked for a body called the Scottish Meteorological Society
whose lofty mission was to understand and predict the weather,
including the extremes that could be found on top of Britain's highest mountain,
Ben Nevis.
But first they had to record the weather.
Regularly.
Between June and October in 1881, Wragge made this climb every day.
Sometimes in appalling weather conditions.
His personal grooming took a bit of a hit.
He became known as "Inclement Wragge".
With interesting results coming in,
the society decided to open a permanent weather station on the summit,
and started a fundraising campaign,
to which Queen Victoria herself contributed £50.
Work started in the summer of 1883 with a bridle path five miles long
snaking its way up the mountain,
and a year later, the sturdy weather station was ready.
And here it is. This is it.
These are the ruins of the observatory that they built in the summer of 1884.
Around a timber frame,
they constructed walls that were up to 12 feet thick.
On top of the walls, they built a wooden tower,
where they kept the instruments with a door on the outside so that
even when the snow almost buried the thing, they could still take their measurements.
Wragge and the other observers were led by one Alexander Buchan,
who became known as the founding father of meteorology.
He understood the importance of making measurements
that might one day reveal patterns of greater significance.
Alexander Buchan was the chief scientist here and organised the programme of work,
which mainly consisted of taking pretty standard readings,
readings that even a gadget like this can get.
So for example, this little fan here whirls around telling me the wind speed.
It's just under one-and-a-half miles an hour,
extraordinary because it can gust up to 100 miles an hour here.
It also tells me that the temperature
is just under 10 degrees Celsius,
and that the pressure is 862 millibars.
It's odd that this little electronic device captures in an instant
what those pioneers over 100 years ago struggled to measure.
Day after day, they made their readings,
undeterred by the severity of the conditions they encountered.
These stones bear witness to the days of manual measurement,
the days when you had to be there to actually write down the data,
the hard slog of gathering facts, which the Victorians excelled at,
and through which the Victorians laid bare those hidden mechanisms of nature.
There was nothing glamorous about they did,
but the scientific findings that emerged were glorious.
Perhaps none more so than the importance of record-keeping itself.
By establishing a tradition of basic data collection,
the early meteorologists gifted future generations
a way of discovering that the globe was warming, and by how much.
And while Buchan and his colleagues were establishing the climate's baseline,
other scientists were beginning to speculate
about the impact of carbon dioxide on it.
In 1896, a pair of Swedish scientists,
Svente Arrhenius and Arvid Hogbom, built upon John Tyndall's findings
by proposing that emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal and oil
might one day warm the planet too much, bringing about global warming.
They began to do the sums.
They figured it would take around 3,000 years for the CO2
to reach dangerously high levels,
levels dangerous enough to warm the planet.
But the Swedes were wrong.
Edinburgh's Scott Monument was started in 1844,
at the height of the industrial revolution.
It commemorates the writer Walter Scott,
but it's also an unintentional monument to the age of carbon.
It's hard to believe that this monument was built of a beautiful cream-coloured sandstone,
Binny stone, which contains a residue of oil shale.
It's that residue that acts as a kind of glue,
sticking the soot and smoke particles to the outside of the stone.
That's why it's so black.
The dirty appearance is the residue of the fires and smoke
from the 19th and 20th centuries.
The fires may have gone out,
but some of the CO2 they released over 100 years ago is still with us.
So is this a good place to measure? Are we high enough up?
It's a perfect place to measure
if you want to measure how much CO2 is in the air above Edinburgh,
particularly above Princes Street.
So what value is it giving us then?
At the moment we're at about 380, 390 parts per million of carbon dioxide,
and that's about right for the globe at the moment.
That's the atmospheric concentration pretty much around the planet,
which is a huge increase on what the concentration of carbon dioxide was
when this monument was built.
What was it back in the industrial revolution?
It was about 290. So we've had an increase
of about 100 parts per million in about 150 years or so.
That additional hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide,
most scientists now believe, is helping to warm the planet.
In Scotland, the average temperature has increased by almost one degree since records began.
How confident is the climate science community that this is a real trend?
Very confident.
The level of consensus is greater than in any other area of science.
By looking at the geological record, we know that the sun is really important.
It's a natural driver of climate change.
We know that volcanic activity is also very important.
But when we look at contemporary climate change,
the rapid warming we have seen in the last 50 years or so,
those natural drivers can't explain it.
What does explain it is the rapid increase in greenhouse gas
and carbon dioxide concentrations.
Natural climate change made its impact felt on Skara Brae and Culbin Sands,
but today it's the carbon dioxide of our industrial era
that is stoking the Earth's temperature.
Coal is no longer king in Scotland.
The era of steam and shale oil has long since passed,
and Tennant's Stalk was dismantled years ago.
They might represent Scotland's past,
but the greenhouse gases they began to release
will help shape our future.
It's pretty easy to get rid of the smoke, grime and filth
of the industrial revolution, you just scrub it out.
But scrubbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
well, that's something completely different.
For me it's beyond reasonable doubt that our greenhouse gases
are stoking the warming of the planet,
and the impact of that can be seen in various corners of the world.
What's much less clear is what impact that will be in the future.
Much depends on the extent to which we can reduce carbon emissions.
The most recent report from the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency
projects that by 2080,
annual summer temperatures in Scotland
could be anything between an optimistic 1.2
to a catastrophic 6.8 degrees centigrade.
Their middle-of-the-range forecast points to a three degree rise.
In this new warmer Scotland,
the growing season may extend by around 33 days.
As temperatures rise, new crops that were once unthinkable become viable.
Crops like grapes.
On the banks of Loch Tay can already be found Britain's most northerly vineyard.
It's hoped that in a couple of years' time,
the yield here will be good enough to produce wine.
But global warming won't mean warm, dry weather all year round.
We are already seeing significant change.
This is a rain gauge which collects daily rainfall,
and it's thanks to instruments like this scattered across the country
that we know Scotland is getting much wetter.
In the last 50 years, total rainfall is up by 20%.
And in winter, rainfall is up by nearly 60%.
So this is now the average amount of rainfall
that we get in the west of Scotland.
THUNDERCLAP
And the bad news is there's more rain in store.
Projections are that by 2080,
there'll be an additional 20% of rainfall in winter.
Brilliant(!)
Apparently the Inuits have about 50 words for snow but...
I think the Scottish have about 100 words for rain, and this is stottin'.
Even if we currently do have 100 words to describe rain,
we might still need to invent some more,
because the kind of rainfall Scotland can expect
will be very dramatic and rather unfamiliar.
Sudden torrential downpours,
deluges that will cause existing city drains to overflow,
and rivers to burst their banks.
The Scottish Environmental Protection Agency estimates
that the flow rate in some of Scotland's rivers
has already increased by 40% in the last 25 years.
And it's projected to increase again.
Unchecked, climate change could be catastrophic.
But unlike the people of Skara Brae or Culbin Sands,
we now have the knowledge and technology to do something about it.
Should we choose to.
Scotland can lead the way in reducing its carbon dioxide emissions.
The target is to cut it them by 80% by 2050.
And just as Scotland's natural resources, its oil and its coal,
helped us kick-start climate change,
others might now be used to combat it.
Nature has already provided one potential weapon,
one that forestry scientists are busy testing.
Forestry is a very simple way
to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Nature has produced a fantastic tool to do that - it's a tree.
As the tree is growing and actively photosynthesising,
that process takes in carbon dioxide,
which a tree then, quite nicely for us, converts into wood,
into a solid form of carbon.
It seems such a simple system that we've kind of taken for granted.
We couldn't have designed it better if we'd asked a million boffins.
As all the scientists in the world will tell you,
we haven't got a lot of time to get our house in order,
so forests that establish quickly and grow quickly
are going to give us that quick fix of carbon.
Presumably some trees are better than others?
There's one that's native, that's Scots pine,
but there's others that aren't native but phenomenally productive.
Like Sitka spruce. Sitka spruce is the key of those species.
We understand it very well.
We've done forestry for decades using this species,
and it produces a...a forest quickly and it stores a lot of carbon.
But we're also looking into other, new exotic species including eucalyptus.
Eucalyptus comes from Australia and loves warm, wet weather.
It also grows faster than almost any other species
that the Forestry Commission has ever tested.
You know, if you're looking for a sign that our future forests
are being designed with a warmer climate in mind,
then you don't need to look beyond these eucalyptus saplings.
And the fact that this tree grows like the clappers to, within a few years,
lock in tonnes of carbon dioxide,
just underpins the urgency, the impetus
that climate change has in forestry circles.
Plus it smells nice too.
Eucalyptus plantations would transform Scotland's landscape, and they would do it quickly,
taking perhaps as little as 25 years to grow into mature forests.
But even fast-growing trees will capture
only a fraction of the carbon dioxide we continue to emit.
They might eventually help to check climate change,
but they won't stop it in its tracks.
A more immediate way to tackle the problem
is to find sources of energy that are not carbon-based.
It's a challenge that Scotland is particularly well placed to meet.
Because, just as Scotland once had carbon-based energy in abundance,
today it has new sources of natural energy in abundance.
120 years ago, when James Watt's invention reigned supreme
and when carbon was fuelling the global economy,
a Scottish scientist was busy inventing the world's very first wind turbine.
James Blyth was professor of natural philosophy
at Anderson's College, Glasgow.
His interest was producing electricity from the wind,
and he set up a laboratory at his holiday home in Marykirk in Aberdeenshire.
DOORBELL RINGS
Hello! Hi. I know this is going to sound mad,
but can I see your back garden?
Course you can, just go round. Thanks then.
I've got the photograph, and this is Blyth House, so...
this should be it.
It's taken from over here, I think.
So that's the two windows up there, three along here.
So this is the big extension.
This shed was there, I guess.
So somewhere around the site of this apple tree
is the world's first electricity generating wind turbine.
Blyth stored his wind power in batteries in his shed
and used it to light his holiday home.
He might have built a wind turbine at the bottom of his back garden,
but Blyth was no mad professor.
He got a patent for the system,
and in fact it worked so well that it generated lots of surplus power.
He offered that surplus power to the people of Marykirk,
to light the main street.
But they refused, on the grounds that electricity was the work of the devil.
So Blyth did the devil's work for the insane instead.
He built another wind turbine for the Montrose lunatic asylum.
It ran for nearly 30 years.
Blyth believed that wind generation was a much better bet than fossil fuels.
But Blyth was a lone voice.
Born in the age of carbon, wind power never really had a chance.
Another century was to lapse before Britain took the simple step
of scaling Blyth's invention into a fully-functioning wind farm.
Now they're rising all over the country.
Blyth was a prophet before his time,
and now, just over 100 years after his death,
I wonder what he would have felt about this site.
He would probably have felt vindicated, proud even,
and perhaps astonished that his primitive designs
have evolved into these powerful, sleek machines,
each turbine generating 750 times the power
of the one that lit his holiday home in Marykirk.
Once we were at the mercy of wild weather like the wind.
It shaped our way of life,
even whether we lived or died.
But today, we can harness even the worst extremes of the world's weather.
This is the Grind of Navir on the northwest coast of Shetland.
Fantastic name, fantastic site, and up until recently
a field of boulders had presented a geological mystery.
It's surreal.
Looks like some giant's been chucking stones or something.
I mean, look at this one, this is colossal!
So how did they get here?
It sounds incredible, I mean, they're so huge.
But they've been moved here by the sea.
Some of them have been picked up from beneath the waves
in huge storms and just dumped on shore,
but most of them, most of them, it's the power of the waves
barrelling through that gap in the cliff face
that's been carved out by erosion,
and forcing its way down onto these rocks
almost like a jackhammer prising blocks apart.
You can see some fresh surfaces here where blocks have been removed,
maybe in the last few winter storms,
and then what happens, these blocks then get taken out of here
and dumped inland, sometimes 80 metres or so inland.
I mean, the power of the waves and the wind to transform this landscape
is utterly awesome.
Imagine that we could capture the power of a wave that can move a mountain.
Think of the energy that could be produced,
the carbon that could be saved.
The seas around the north coast of Scotland
have some of the strongest waves and tides in the world.
That's an enormous source of untapped and renewable energy.
But transporting electricity from remote sites like Shetland,
whether generated by wind or wave, comes at a price.
Pylons 65 metres high are planned to carry power cables
from Scotland's northeast to the central belt,
across 137 miles of some of the finest Highland scenery.
This a simulation.
The reality will follow soon.
Carbon withdrawal isn't going to be pain-free.
We've come a long way in the last 10,000 years.
Superstition has given way to science.
We might not have mastered the weather but we have come to understand it.
The genius and geology of Scotland gave us the industrial revolution,
carbon and climate change.
Now, I like to believe that Scotland can help propel the world into a new and cleaner age.
One son of Scotland, James Watt,
kick-started the industrial revolution.
And perhaps another great Scot, James Blyth,
will be the forerunner of the next one -
the transformation of our carbon economy into a green one.
And what a revolution that'll be.
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