Two events last week led me to muse on the links between the man who is now our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, and the extinction of the woolly mammoth. A team of scientists suggest in Nature Geoscience that the sudden extinction of the mammoths some 12,000 years ago, as the world emerged from the last ice age, may have had a dramatic effect on the Earth’s climate. They argue that the emission by these giant herbivores of nine million tons a year of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than CO2, was so significant that their disappearance led to a sharp drop in global temperatures, and the world temporarily froze over again in the re-glaciation known as the Younger Dryas.