William M. Gray, a prominent hurricane forecaster and professor at Colorado State University, appeared this week at The Heartland Institute's 2009 climate change conference to blame the ocean's saltiness for at least some of the global warming that's occurred. That's according to NewsBusters, which notes that Gray is nonetheless a global warming debunker--"appalled" that James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and an outspoken global warming theorist, was selected for a prestigious meteorological medal. Gray, who views Hansen as part of a group that irresponsibly overestimates global warming, might well have harsh words for the United Nations' climate change panel this week, after it concluded that there has been a severe underestimation of the rise of the sea level caused by global warming (via Reuters). Meanwhile, veteran Greenland researcher Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado now acknowledges an acceleration of ice loss in Greenland over the past decade. And a local contributor to The Big Money writes that Colorado "bean counters are in permanent freeze-thaw" in a global-warming battleground: a building with an inefficient, environmentally un-friendly heating system.