I ADMIT IT. The last time my boyfriend got his hair cut, I didn’t notice. But
as unobservant as I am, you might think I’d at least notice if I was living
through both an ice age and a mass extinction on the scale of the one that wiped
out the dinosaurs.
Apparently not. I used to think I knew what scientists mean when they bandy
terms like “ice age” and “extinction”. I imagined dinosaurs choking on poisonous
gas, and snow falling in the tropics. Pretty dramatic stuff. But over free beers
at a conference in Edinburgh last month, I…
