Sigh! Hundreds of shrinking glaciers all around the globe doesn't prove a thing according to those sceptics, but one thickening ice sheet at the South Pole and the debate is supposedly over.
Answer:
There
is actually very little data about the changes in the mass of the
Antarctic ice sheets, and the conclusion of some growth in the East
Antarctic ice sheet is so little that with the uncertainty, it might
even be shrinking. This is not a surprising phenomenon as such an
increase would be the result of increasing percipitation and this is
fully consistent with a warming world as the antarctic is a desert
and warmer climates tend towards more percipitation. Even if you
warmed 100C from -500C, you would still be
accumulating snow, not melting in the rain.
There is some widespread glacial melting on the Antarctic peninsula (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=146) and ice shelves are breaking up, but it does indeed appear that the mass balance on ice at the South Pole may be positive but negligible. This does not, however contradict the theory of Global Warming in any way whatsoever.
While on the
subject of ice sheets, Greenland is also growing ice in the center
for the same reasons described above, but it is melting on the
exterior regions, on the whole losing approximately 200 km3
of ice annually, doubled now from a decade ago. This is a huge amount
compared to what the changes may be in the Antarctice, around three
orders of magnitude larger. So any potenial gain in total volume of
ice on the planet due to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is wiped out
many many times over by Greenland's ice sheet.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2006-023
http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/steffen/greenland/melt2005/
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/grace-20051220.html
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