[choeger]

You might be right and you certainly have a point regarding the "deniers". But your first bullet point is blatantly wrong. Melting and compaction cannot increase mass. You might have simply made a mistake here, but at first glance it seems like you throw any scientific accuracy overboard just to prove your point that the sea level will raise. That way you weaken your argument of "scientific people against deniers" considerably.

[zdragnar]

The idea is that the ice mass is increasing, because the millenia-old snow cover over the ice is melting and compacting into the ice sheet itself.

Took me a few reads to reconcile that myself.

[rolph]

these are the caveats of data presentation that consume an incredible number of hours compared to actually designing an experimental protocol and generating data sets.

this is one of the major activites during thesis defense, tearing apart semantics to be sure that verbal descriptors are representative of observations, and free of qualifiers or modulations.

Also defense of scientific thesis involves a discourse between supporters and deniers as a matter of course. This is the way science works, two opposing positions meet somewhere in between. usually a third external will weaken or reinforce one side over the other. The ultimate goal is not to proclaim who is right or wrong but to refine interpretations into representations of real physical processes