All the information to understand the thermal expansion of ocean water is available with a few google searches, so why should you lean back and wait for somebody to enlighten you ?

Depends on where you look. Part of the heat has temporarily gone into the oceans. This becomes clearer when you separate the La-Nina years from the El-Nino years, and plot separate trend lines for them: http://blog.chron.com/climatea...

You must have missed the Cryosat data, then. Antarctic sea ice is pretty much irrelevant in the discussion. It is mostly seasonal, and it has negligible impact on sea level. What we care about is the the grounded ice, and we care about the volume, not the area.

No, most lay people are not smart (or educated in the subject) enough to correctly analyse the data. And the people are capable of analysing the data, are also capable of finding the data. It's not that well hidden, actually.

But temperatures are rising. Your argument is invalid.

If CO2 is following temperature, what is your explanation for the fact that CO2 is now at a milion-year record high ?

And despite bitter cold temperatures on Antarctica, it is losing ice at an accelerating rate. Please explain.

That is only partially true. As you increase temperature from 0 to 4 degrees C, you are correct that water contracts. But for temperatures above 4 degrees, the water starts expanding again. Above 8 degrees, water takes up more volume than ice.

Sounds like somebody needs to learn the big difference between Antarctic sea ice and grounded ice.

I bet climate scientists will be shocked to hear water can also evaporate. I'm sure nobody has ever considered that. You'd better start working on your Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

I don't think there's much useful ice volume data before special satellites were used to measure it. However, we can look at historical sea level data, and observe that levels have not been significantly higher in any period since the last ice age. We can also look at the temperature data, and try to model the ice sheet based on those. Since temperatures before 2005 have been lower, it is very unlikely ice loss was as great as it has been in the recent years.

Where do you get that this prediction is easily testable ? Have you read the article ?

There's probably an error bar mentioned in the paper that was left out of the BBC article. Still, it's only 2 significant digits, so it's not even very precise.

Actually, this recent study claims that in the years 2005-2011, contribution from melting ice was 3 times as high as thermal expansion of the oceans: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/jou...

Of course, there's more than just Antarctic ice melting, but more importantly, it is likely that the melting rate will accelerate as the planet keeps warming.