Like a culinary global warming, Bostonians' taste buds have gotten progressively more comfortable with hot-and-spicy foods. What does this mean for us? Like the frogs in Al Gore's cinematic opus, are we adjusting to the warming world bit by bit? Just look at the profusion of ethnic eateries with hot stuff front and center on the menu: Thai one very corner, Indian restaurants stacked like saris, "Hell Nights," Caribbean jerk on summer menus.

It's interesting that most hot-and-spicy food comes from hot-weather locations, with Southern India, one of the world's most challenging climates, offering a cuisine that is tops on the Scoville scale. What's the Scoville scale, you ask? It's the measure of the hotness of a chili pepper, developed by Wilbur Scoville in 1912. The main culprit iscapsaicin, the naturally occurring heat engine in raw peppers. A sweet pepper - like a green bell pepper - has a Scoville rating of zero; one of the hottest peppers, ahabañero, gets 350,000. Scotch Bonnet rates between100,000 and 300,000. Red Tabasco sauce hits 7000Scovilles; green gets only between 600 and 800 on the scale. As a point of reference, habañeros are used in Mexican, Thai, Caribbean, and African cooking, among others. Be forewarned.

Johnny Levins was one of the pioneers of hot stuff in Boston. As the chef at Green Street Grill, he was the man responsible for teaching us that a Scotch Bonnet is a chili pepper, not a chapeau, and that Caribbean food is a lot more than piña coladas on the beach. Now Levins has his own new spot in Arlington, Something Savory, and he thinks some-thing's up - and it's not just the weather. Levins says that, after a 10-yearbreak, people's palates are again craving high heat.

"During the '80s, people started to love hot food," he notes. "They couldn't get enough of it. Everything I made was hot, and people often asked for it to be even hotter. Then in the '90s, the hot thing seemed to fizzle. Suddenly everyone was eating steak and frites, and even I started to turn the heat way down."

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Levins says his cooking today is a little less hot than it was when he began offering his Caribbean tropical-fruit-and-chili-pepper menus in the'80s. But when he considered truly toning down the Scovilles, there was an outcry. "I got telephone calls and e-mails and customers begging to keep up the heat," Levins says. His customers are all ages; they come in once or twice a week to feast on the ribs, jerked pork shoulder, and Caribbean goat roti. Levins seasons his food mild, medium, or hot on request, and he makes his own jerk mix of seven or eight spices, with ample pinches of Scotch Bonnet, jalapeño, and a spice from the bark of the Anaheim tree.

But as hot as Caribbean food can be, it's generally recognized that the mother of all hot cooking lives in India. The legend is that Indian food evolved because when you live in a hot climate, eating spicy food makes you sweat, and the sweat chills your body. (You can't help but notice that food that originated in Northern Europe is pretty bland in comparison to the stuff from hotter climates.) But even in Northern India, often a pretty chilly place, the culinary tradition is very Scoville-friendly. When Vik Kapoor opened Tamarind Bay in Harvard Square two years ago, he assumed that most non-Indian Americans would want their food mildly spiced. But he was in for a surprise. "Where I come from, if super-hot is a 10 on a 10-point scale, we cook at a five," he says. "But in Southern India, normal heat is a seven or eight, and there are a large number of diners [here] who seem to want their food to hit those sevens or eights. They ask for chili sauce on the side, spicy ketchup, spicy condiments - and still they tell us that they want us to make their dishes even hotter." The hottest plates on the Tamarind Bay menu are the lamb dish rogan josh, the my sore chili chicken, and achari jhinga - pickle-flavored baby shrimp. "They just ?yout of the kitchen," Kapoor says.

Thailand is a bridge between India and China, and as a result, Thai food falls somewhere between the "blandness of Chinese food and the hot-and-spicy food of India," says Suriyant Jamdee, owner of the two Brown Sugar restaurants in Boston and chef at the Similans in Cambridge. Jamdee thinks that requests for spicy food have increased over the past few years in part because more people from Boston have traveled to Thailand. "So many people ask me to make their meal 'Thai-style,' not 'American-style,' "he says. "They've been to Thailand and know that Thai people eat their food very hot. And they think if it is hotter, it's more authentic."

But Jamdee wants diners to know that the food doesn't have to be hot to be good. He's happy to cook each dish on his menu to suit a customer's heat palate, but he says more than half of the orders at theSimilans are for hot and very hot entrées. "We have a lot of regulars, and each time they come in, they ask me to make it spicier than the last time. I didn't expect that," Jamdee says. "Pretty soon, all of Boston will be eating like Thai people." And if our eating habits continue to parallel global warming, instead of growing up on Gerber apple sauce, the next generation may be brought up on hot-and-sour pickle salad.@