Climate scientists have tended to studiously ignore ice mass and sea ice growth around Antarctica as a whole while at the same time screaming blue murder that the West Antarctic peninsular is losing ice. This is the small piece of Antarctica that sticks up into the Southern Ocean towards S America and is forever subject to periodic exposure to warm ocean currents migrating from the Pacific through the Indian towards the Atlantic oceans – some of which re-enters the Pacific via the Magellan Straits. Numerous papers are published on a regular basis and these have tended to give the false impression to Joe Public that it is Antarctica as a whole that sheds ice – when it is no such thing and ice mass has been growing on the bigger continent sized chunk.
At http://climateaudit.org/2015/12/02/antarctic-ice-mass-controversies/ …. has an extremely interesting post in that it explains the statistical methodology behind the various climate papers and you are left with the impression some people will deliberately obscure the truth and twist the facts in order to get away with promoting their agenda without allowing the opposition a voice of protest. This seems to occur over and over again. One side appears to dominate the peer review process in order to keep out heretical views – no matter how much actual evidence is accumulated. It is an interesting piece that becomes even more interesting when it comes to the study of the West Antarctic peninsular throughout the Holocene period. Apparently, there has been a massive ongoing reduction and an up and down variation up to the present. The peninsular is not a stable place as far as the amount of ice it may hold at any given moment in time. There is also an unmistakable drop in the amount of ice on the peninsular in comparison to the position during the Late Glacial Maximum when massive glaciation all the way up to Patagonia are a well recorded phenomenon. From a Catastrophist point of view this appears to support the idea of pole movement at the end of the LGM, an unfashionable hypothesis and one that uniformitarians invariably ignore. In the context of a shift from a glaciated phase to a less than glaciated phase the West Antarctic peninsular would appear to conform to such a pattern – but of course, conjecture here is meant rather than fact. Patagonia was a lot colder during the LGM – but so were parts of Australia (unglaciated but cold). One would need a process to explain this – and other explanations may be brought into the equation.
The reality is that the fall from icy conditions as a result of the end of LGM scenario, mainstream or catastrophist, is and has been a bonus for the global warming crowd. They have been able to show that ice has receded in one part of Antarctica without the necessity of showing it might have grown in another part of the continent. After all, the major portion of Antarctica is under a massive ice sheet. At the same time they clearly don't know why so much ice has been lost on the peninsular, apart from declining global temperatures. The fact the variation during the Holocene has been a fraction of what it was at the end of the LGM is neither here nor there but what it does do is show the idea of global warming as a factor is not the least unprecedented. In fact, what we see is a real hockey stick – one going in the wrong direction. The uptick of the blade is at the end of the LGM rather than in the 20th or 21st centuries – and the handle is the Holocene pattern as a whole.