Reports of Accelerated Ice Melting In Antarctic Are Just Another Global Warming Scare Tactic

On Monday the Guardian reported its weekly, "Oh my God, Global Warming is going to cause us all to die!" report and per tradition numbers were cherry-picked to make things look more ominous than they really are.

Per the Guardian:

Antarctica is shedding 160 billion tonnes a year of ice into the ocean, twice the amount of a few years ago, according to new satellite observations. The ice loss is adding to the rising sea levels driven by climate change and even east Antarctica is now losing ice.

The new revelations follows the announcement last week that the collapse of the western Antarctica ice sheet has already begun and is unstoppable, although it may take many centuries to complete.

Global warming is pushing up sea level by melting the world’s major ice caps and by warming and expanding oceans waters. The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet would eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise, devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world.

Let's talk about this claim; first of all they are speaking about land ice---when one includes sea ice---well lets just say that mother nature does not agree with the alarmists. In fact Antarctic polar ice extent has set another new record, defying alarmist global warming claims. According to the NOAA:

• Global Sea Ice Extent is 610,000 sq km above the 1981-2010 mean.
• Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is 1,202,000 sq km above the 1981-2010 mean. That is the 69th daily record of 2014.
• Arctic Sea Ice Extent is -593,000 sq km below the 1981-2010 mean.

In other words when you consider both poles, there is 610,000 more square kilometers of sea ice than usual, which means don't run out to Walmart to buy SCUBA gear, the coasts aren't about to be flooded out of existence.

Even if you want to work with the reports and just count the land-based ice, as WattsUpWithThat.com points out:

From the press release, we are seeing about 159 billion tons/year of ice converted to meltwater (unless it sublimates), so the effect on sea level would be 159/1000 or 0.159 x 3 millionths of a meter, or 0.477 millionths of  meter of sea level rise per year from this.

(...)And so, the loss of 0.159 cubic kilometer of ice per year is apparently headline worthy, because at that rate of loss, it would take 169,811,320.7 (169 million) years to lose all the 27 million cubic kilometers of Antarctic ice.

I’m pretty sure we’ll have gone through a few ice ages by then.

Perhaps the most important piece of information all of the doom and gloom predictions ignore is from August 1996 through April 2014, 17 years and 9 months there has been no warming. Think about that for a second, people who are not old enough to have seen Independence Day when it first came out in the theaters have never experienced global warming.

Anyone who blames extreme weather events, droughts or wild fires or supposed continental ice melts on global warming is a science denier, because the science shows it hasn't gotten warmer in almost 18 years.