It was perhaps the surest Oscar bet of the past 30 years. That Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" would win the prize for Best Documentary. (Complete list of winners here.)

Were the bookies in Vegas even taking bets on that category? Probably not, they're not that stupid.

Last Monday, the Union-Tribune's new ombudsman wrote about the settled science of global warming.

For staff writer Craig Rose, it was “a watershed moment” when the international report on climate change concluded that the chances are at least 90 percent that global warming is caused by human activity.

He likened the report Feb. 2 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the surgeon general's 1964 report calling cigarette smoking a cause of lung cancer and linking it to other serious illnesses.

Rose, who covers energy issues, spoke up at the informal 11 o'clock news meeting to make the point that this report deserved special attention.

As it turned out, editors scrapped plans to insert local information into a wire story and instead got staff writers Mike Lee and Bruce Lieberman, with help from Rose, to write an original story that went beyond summarizing the report to discuss what can be done about global warming, said Hieu Tran Phan, specialists editor.

In a story that dominated the front page and took up three-quarters of an inside page, just two paragraphs dealt with skeptics' comments that reaction to the report was overblown. There wasn't a single quote from a scientist who disputes global warming.

And I didn't get a single complaint.

Although Phan recalls being asked to add a skeptical voice to one story on global warming within the past year, he sees that push easing with the latest report.

It's standard operating procedure for journalists covering a controversial issue to offer contrasting opinions in the interest of balance.

But for years there's been consensus on this topic among scientists, with just a few skeptics on the fringe. Sometimes the facts are so overwhelming on one side that it's unfair and inaccurate to give equal weight to both sides. This is one of those times.

I disagree. I think that the majority of skeptics have given up on getting fair treatment from the mainstream media. Why bother fighting these little battles on the pages of every local newspaper? The fight to be waged must be at the state and federal level by trying to minimize the amount of money thrown down a rathole in order to "stave off" global warming that is going to happen anyway.

The media goes ape over these IPCC reports, but "inconvenient truths" about what we really know about global warming are left to conservative publications and think tanks.

From a National Review article by Cato Institute scholar Patrick J. Michaels:

Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn’t changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC’s methane emissions scenarios as “quite unlikely.”

Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.’s new projection is about 30-percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001. “The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993,” according to the IPCC, “but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future.”

According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.

“Was” is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland’s ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed.

I'll say it again: Human-caused global warming is bunk.

Ask yourself this question: If the Earth was getting warmer and it was largely due to ... say ... a humongous, uncontrolled fusion reaction known more commonly as the Sun, would these research scientists be getting all this grant money from governments and left-wing philanthropists around the world to study how to stop it? If this was merely part of a 1,500 year cycle of warming and cooling, would Al Gore have an Oscar tonight?

The answers are obvious, and it is made worse by the fact that the media consistently refuses to truly illustrate to the public what scientists say would be required to stop the warming trend. From Michaels piece:

It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about various “solutions” for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That’s too small to measure, because the earth’s temperature varies by more than that from year to year.

The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto — i.e., less than nothing — for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today).

Skeptics like myself have just about written the media off. We're content to wait 30 years and have our "I told you so's" ready when scientists finally get their climate models right. Think of this as replay of the population bomb and peak oil scares of the '60s and '70s.

So, don't confuse getting no complaints as acquiescence -- we've simply decided that it's a waste of our time arguing with you anymore.

*UPDATE* Monday's ombudsman column features various replies from skeptics.