Just got a hold of September 27th issue of the Largs and Millport weekly news. The front page has the headline; Largs in sea level warning. I went to work that morning and travelled along the Greenock road towards Fairlie. I could see that a good bit of Largs Pier was exposed to the elements and a lot of dark coloured boulders lay amongst seaweed and sand. Fairlie wasn't much better. Lots of sand which seemed to stretch almost to Cumbrae, again with varying sizes of rock peppering the scene. Could you imagine my surprise when I returned home after a hard days graft to find that the sea had covered everything No sand? No rocks and the piers looked like they'd shrunk. Could this be global warming? 
Then I remembered it was only the tide. Silly me. Nothing to worry about. Imagine the tide came in and didn't stop coming in? Well, millions of years ago the sea was much higher than it is today. More than 100 metres higher. Then there were times when the sea was 300 metres lower than today. The sea has been rising and falling this way for billions of years.Temperatures have been rising and fallen too. Limestone laid down in Cambrian times, more than half a billion years ago, contains 44% co2. Where did the co2 come from? Heavy industry? Don't think so. After some of the many ice ages the Earth has experienced, temperatures suddenly rose so the ice sheets melted away in less than 50 years. Ice that was nearly half a mile thick and been dominating the landscape for more than 90,000 years was gone in less than fifty years. Where did all that extra heat come from? Did the sun go through some dramatic phases which we don't understand? The world is going to heat up and cool down. Seas will rise and fall to natures tune like its always done. The planet doesn't even know we're here. For me, a bit more co2 in the atmosphere would not go amiss 'cause I'm fed up paying rip off energy costs. Here's to global warming if such a thing exists.
Douglas Allan