re: The latest on Global Warming

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Well, there's Canada, Alaska, and Greenland

I remember one time when a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island broke off of the ice sheet in the antarctic and you would have thought Global Warming had just been proven that it would murder us all by the day after tomorrow

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Eh, those don't drain into the Arctic for the most part, except for the very Northern parts of Greenland and Ellesmere. Canada and Alaska drain into the river and lake systems of NA.

What I mainly take issue with is the idea that thick Antarctic sea ice is this super-surprising trump card that the egghead scientists and their fancy models didn't see coming. On this point, the eggheads called it. Check this paper out. It's from one of the very earliest climate modelers, a guy named Syukuro Manabe, written about some of his modeling done in 1990:

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It is surprising, however, that the sea-ice thickness in the G integration increases significantly in the immediate vicinity of the Antarctic Continent despite the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This is consistent with the slight reduction of sea surface temperature mentioned earlier (Fig. 10a). It will be shown in section 9a that, owing to the intensification of the near-surface halocline caused by the increased supply of water at the oceanic surface, the convective mixing of cold near-surface water with warmer, underlying water becomes less frequent, resulting in the increase of sea ice and slight reduction in sea surface temperature.

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TL;DR when you dump a bunch of fresh water from the ice sheets into the surrounding ocean, you reduce the near-surface salinity and make it easier for more ice to form farther down. Plus, Antarctica losing land ice but gaining sea ice isn't really a great trade in terms of long-term sea level rise.

(NB: I'm making an observation about one aspect of AGW here. Do not interpret this as complete and utter fealty to ALGORE and start interrogating me about hockey sticks. It gets tiresome.)