I have a problem with this part:
"There is a difference of 300* between these two figures. Even if I am wrong by an order of magnitude, there is still an enormous difference. This does NOT mean that ice caps have not melted in the distant past nor that ice-age glaciers have not grown to cover much of the northern hemisphere; it simply means that the time scales involved to move sufficient quantities of heat to effect such melting or freezing occur over what we scientists commonly call "geological" time scales, i.e. hundreds of thousands and millions of years."
We know pretty much for a fact that very large glaciers covered all of Canada and probably 20-25% of the northern tier of United States only about 15-18,000 years ago. Now, virtually all of that is gone.
It obviously didn't take "geologic" time scales to melt those glaciers - i.e. "hundreds of thousands of years". A couple of thousand years got the job done.
By those standards there's hardly any ice left to be melted anyway.
NOTE: the Ice Lobe covering the Lower Midwest penetrated into a still Temperate climatological zone. The ice there melted rapidly even during the height of the glaciation in North America. Ice continued to flow South to that area and was always melting. You could hunt Mastadons at the foot of a two mile high glacier, and while dining, be eaten leisurly by a local sabre toothed tiger!
Are the Icecaps melting?
We know the answer.
But we don’t understand the question.
Yes. The icecaps are melting. And they are freezing.
The ‘question’ that they are really asking is “Are the caps disappearing?”.
No. They are simply moving.
Changes in the jet stream and ocean currents can cause changes in the edges of the polar ice cap.
That is what we are ‘seeing’ happen now.
In geological time, the ‘cold’ polar region of the ‘sphere’ does not move.
It is the crust of the Earth which moves. Antartica wasn’t always ‘the south pole’.