Pleistocene Climate Change Context

A roadmap of the last 50,000 years helps put the modern global warming in context:

This awesome graph, and many others, can be found here. Includes a good discussion of the Eemian interglacial and other interglacials in comparison with the modern Holocene.

Antarctic Ice Increasing?

Most of this post deals with a paper by Turner, 2009.

My confusion started with a Watts Up With That post claiming that Antartica is actually gaining sea ice. As usual, a SkepticalScience page attempts a refutation, but to do so has to get into some complicated details.

So what is the trend?

from: http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html

But Antartic sea ice is formed by a number of factors, including UV radiation from the hole in the Ozone layer, and land ice has been decreasing:"Ozone levels over Antarctica have dropped causing stratospheric cooling and increasing winds which lead to more areas of open water that can be frozen"

Apparently, land ice is more important in Antartica, and this had been decreasing. If the Ross Ice sheet collapsed, as it has numerous times in past interglacials, it would raise sea level by 21 feet.