We can argue whether Man is responsible for the warming, and we can also argue whether there has been a pause in the warming, but we cannot say there has been no warming--melting ice doesn't lie. And we have seen "pauses" before. Caution is in order.
Increasing land and sea ice in Antarctica does not lie... good to know. Obviously the ice is melting in some places and increasing in other places... this cycle has gone on for 1000s of years. In balance the total ice covering the earth has remained the same over the past decades without significant deviation from the norm.
Net warming of the air, or the earth? Because the air is just a small fraction of the earth's heat content. Something you denialists seem to be ignorant of or just forget for some reason.
Figure 6: Average of all five data sets (GISS, NCDC, HadCRU, UAH, and RSS) with the effects of ENSO, solar irradiance, and volcanic emissions removed (Foster and Rahmstorf 2011)
The temperature of the ocean has risen 0.04 degrees over 50 years. Where is the heat hiding? The IPCC wants to know. Can someone tell them. They are going to look pretty foolish shortly when the earth enters a cold cycle.
This is an example where you and gbw are both right. It is clear that ice has receded in some spots and grown in others. You are certainly correct, melting ice does not lie, and disappearing ice cover indicates warming in that area of the Earth. It does not tell us what is causing the warming, and it does not tell us what is going on elsewhere on the Earth. The concern is global warming not regional ice cap warming per se, and as we all know the Earth does not warm or cool uniformly. It is difficult to learn what the overall trend is, if any. Our most reliable data, though it could be subject to systematic error, of course, is coming from remote sensing satellites. That data is telling us, within reasonable confidence limits, that there has been no measurable net warming or cooling for nearly two decades.
New paper shows ice mass stable to increasing over most of Antarctic ice sheet http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2014/08/new-paper-shows-ice-mass-stable-to.html