A favorite rant of the climate change skeptics is that "Antarctic ice is increasing, not decreasing."
Where were they when the Larsen B ice shelf, an area the size of Rhode Island, collapsed in 2002?
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Like most people, I ignore them, knowing that new data will rebuke them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Escalating Ice Loss Found in Antarctica
Sheets Melting in an Area Once Thought to Be Unaffected by Global Warming
By Marc Kaufman
Monday, January 14, 2008; A01
Climatic changes appear to be destabilizing vast ice sheets of western Antarctica that had previously seemed relatively protected from global warming, researchers reported yesterday, raising the prospect of faster sea-level rise than current estimates...
There's also a noon live-chat Q&A
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
..."Without doubt, Antarctica as a whole is now losing ice yearly, and each year it's losing more," said Eric Rignot, lead author of a paper published online in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Here's the really scary part
Rignot said the tonnage of yearly ice loss in Antarctica is approaching that of Greenland,.......The new finding comes days after the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the group's next report should look at the "frightening" possibility that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could melt rapidly at the same time.
And here's the take from the UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...