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Adam Duritz, lead singer, Counting Crows

A study published last week in the journal Science concludes that the Earth's polar ice sheets are going to melt at a faster rate than scientists originally believed. The fact that the Earth is warming on a global scale is no longer debatable.

What is still contested is just how much of the warming effect is due to the man-made intensification of greenhouse gases versus natural processes, such as the natural production of carbon dioxide and methane, solar variability, thermal rotations in the Earth's core, etc. Regardless of whether or not nature or man is the cause, Earth is warming up, and so is our ocean.

The 71 percent of salt water covering our planet is not a territory of isolated seas. There is only one ocean. We break it down into parts so we can navigate it, explain it and exploit it. It's tempting to turn this column into an indictment of the recklessness resulting in the near extinction of numerous aquatic species, the death of corral reefs and the proliferation of contaminants, like mercury, that have found their way into our bodies through tainted tuna, swordfish, marlin and shark meat.

Instead of bashing the fishing industry for the unnecessary deaths of millions of inadvertent fish species, thousands of sea turtles, sea birds and mammals (estimated to be as high as 88 billion pounds of life each year), I will focus on a chain reaction of oceanic warming that threatens to rattle every homeowner and elected official in Congress: Warm oceans fuel hurricanes; warmer oceans fuel bigger hurricanes; bigger hurricanes cause more damage; insurance companies aren't going to accept high levels of loss; we're all going to pay for it.

In 1975, the percentage of all hurricanes that reached category 4 or 5 was about 20 percent. Since 1975, the percentage of category 4 and 5 hurricanes has steadily increased. By 1990, monster hurricanes made up 30 percent of the total. In the past few years, that percentage has risen to about 35 percent. Also since 1975, the average summer surface temperature of our ocean has steadily increased by about one-half degree Celsius.

Coincidence? As I pointed out earlier, pinpointing the cause of the Earth's warming is a complicated matter, and it would be unscientific to connect any particular event, like Hurricane Katrina, to global warming.

The economic, and soon to be political, fallout from this data is that insurance companies aren't going to take it in the proverbial shorts anymore. Companies like Allstate Corp. and Nationwide Mutual, still reeling from $56 billion in hurricane-related damages, are dropping some policies altogether in coastal regions and making up for their recent losses by raising the premiums on other policyholders - even those who live nowhere near hurricane territory.

According to a March 23 story in the Wall Street Journal, reinsurance companies (the ones who insure insurance companies), such as Swiss Reinsurance Co. and Munich Re AG, have drawn up new projections based on natural weather cycles and "global warming resulting from human activity" that point to "more frequent and intense tropical storms and hurricanes over wider areas of the U.S. for the next 10 to 20 years."

If you're a homeowner and you live hundreds of miles from an ocean and haven't thought much about global warming, maybe you should, because I can almost guarantee the price of your homeowner's insurance is going up.

Considering the salinity of our eye fluid and the history of our biology, we basically view the world through sea water. Perhaps we should take a deeper look into the sea water itself.

Bullington is senior policy adviser and director of New Mexico government relations for the Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber law firm. He writes this column weekly, and can be e-mailed at jd88kaol.com.