Reading in The Guardian that the need for minerals to use in the production of electric cars is driving undersea mining, and that this mining is likely to be disruptive to an already threatened marine environment, prompted me to offer an alternative theory. Unfortunately it does not offer any easy solutions to global pollution and climate change, but if I am correct it means that we are diving off down a dead end route which will not actually solve any of the problems. First of all, I continue to be slightly sceptical that the current upward trends in global temperatures are totally anthropogenic in nature. Warming periods have come and gone throughout Earth’s long and turbulent history, and historically we are overdue for the next ice age, a phenomenon which seems from the available paleontology evidence to have been preceded on each occasion by a very warm period. (Think, for example, of the evidence that there were wild hippopotamuses in London 125,000 years ago.) Suggestions