If global warming's impact on the environment isn't enough to get you to change your energy guzzling ways, maybe soaring homeowners insurance costs will get your attention.

Insurers typically raise rates, curtail coverage or stop writing policies in certain areas after a spate of bad weather or big disaster season and the 2005 hurricane seasons was no different.

Now in 2006 with droughts and fires in the West and Florida, floods in the Northeast, more hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and twisters down South this year -- not to mention what more Mother Nature will throw at the nation with a half year still to go -- the rising cost of homeowners insurance will spread financial disaster to more households, even those not in disaster areas.

Insurers aren't off the hook. Inaccurate risk modeling, decades of discounted rates and bad investments are part of the reason rates are rising.

And then there's global warming.

Global warming changes meteorological patterns and that typically spawns more severe weather. Earth's slow-simmer phenomenon has been blamed for the busy 2005 hurricane season, not to mention other weird weather patterns worldwide.

If scientists who weigh in on the human-factor side of the equation are right, then your carbon monoxide generating habits are contributing to higher insurance costs.

And it's not just the cost of insurance.