Within the next two generations, communities across the Highlands and Islands will be obliterated by global warming, a leading Highland historian will tell a conference today. The conference on renewable energy will be held on the remote Knoydart peninsula, which was once so comprehensively cleared of its people that today no-one can claim to be truly local. James Hunter, historian and former chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, will tell delegates that global warming presents a greater threat than the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. However, his views are unlikely to endear him to opponents of windfarms in the islands. Dr Hunter believes that the growing numbers of opponents to windfarms fail to understand that global warming could finish the job of the clearances.His paper says: "I want to put on record my growing conviction that, inside one human lifetime, two at most, a significant number of Highlands and Islands communities will have been obliterated. Those communities will disappear because of global warming." There was no reason to disbelieve forecasts that the earth's temperature would rise by 3?C by 2100, he said. This would cause the melting of the icecaps and a sea-level rise of one metre. Dr Hunter pointed to the damage done by January's gales to the Uist and Barra machairs. "If we don't take steps, our island machair lands, along with the communities and the wildlife they sustain, can't conceivably have much time left." Dr Hunter said that when he passed a windfarm, he didn't see a disfiguring blot on the landscape, but evidence that we may be able to keep civilisation going without inflicting irreparable damage on our natural environment. That was why he found it difficult to engage with the arguments of windpower's numerous opponents. He knows and respects many. "But when I listen to them talk of the damage windfarms do to scenery, to wild land, peat moors, birds and all the rest, it always seems to me that, however powerful the arguments are, they're also totally beside the point. "It was as if in 1940 the massive airbases constructed on islands like Tiree and Lewis should had been opposed because of the great harm they would do to the land." Such an idea would have seemed absurd in 1940. The Nazi threat was an infinitely greater hazard to our way of life than the concrete and the tarmac then being spread across Hebridean landscapes. "Global warming is a more insidious and longer-term danger than Hitlerism, but it's one that could be far more deadly. Ultimately, it might extinguish humanity itself. "In the shorter run, and much more certainly, it will destroy many of the most significant natural features of the Western Isles." Finlay Macleod, the Gaelic writer, sees things very differently. His house on the west of Lewis will be within one mile of the 234-turbine farm proposed for Lewis by Amec. He said: "Nobody is underestimating the danger of global warming, but windfarms will never be an answer. So why plunder a fragile landscape, which can never be returned?" | 
