One possibility has been that a massive escape of methane from the ocean floor tipped the climate into a new hothouse regime.
Our dancing has picked up, and we know how to let the slow lift of the floor tip us together, and to wait for the sensual tilt and counterflow of the departing wave.
There, amid tables laden with Lady Soames's tchotchkes and home furnishings, were fifteen painted wonders by Winston Churchill starkly laid out on the floor, tipped back against walls and benches.
For the Tories, it would need somebody capable of inspiring, and delivering to, the post-industrial communities of England and Wales; giving enough working-class people a material stake in the wealth created so that the political balance in the working men's clubs and factory floors tipped rightwards.
The first of the seminal reading ages, of course, is the floor-tipping, giddily joyous moment at which you become a free and fluent reader, hunched over books of your own choosing and unleashed from the strictures of learn-to-read schemes.
The floor lurches, tips again and everything falls.
But Widdy and Horwood have a couple of dancing numbers, during one of which he hurls her across the floor (taking tips from John Sergeant?) like a sack of potatoes, which is very funny.
"What's not to be happy?" "And how are you?" He put his right hand on her waist (he could feel a stiff undergarment), and foxtrotted her toward the middle of the floor, the tips of her breasts brushing his jacket front.
She files a look-ahead TV spot for a foreign-exchange news Web site, then wanders through the NYBOT's huge green-paneled trading floor, exchanging tips with other traders before each commodity opens.
She lifts one of the thirty tubs of paint grouped on the butcher paper taped to the floor and tips it for me to see: the color of red wine, the consistency of cottage cheese.
