Good point.
Trends are actually in the other direction. Southern hemisphere ice and high latitude temperature trends would suggest expansion of sea ice and no significant melting of land ice in the Antarctic. Any reduction in northern polar ice was more apparent in the decade 1998 to 2007 than in the past eight years. If anything, there has been an overall cooling trend in the arctic since the rather extensive melting event of 2007. The frequency of severe winters has increased in recent years too. Many signs point to the real story being confusion between the natural variability always at work, and the postulated AGW signal which at worst must be much smaller than theorized by many in the period from 1980 to 2010. This is gradually being realized by more people in the atmospheric sciences and you would have to say that the general public had the same basic idea only faster and without as much formal study.
In other words, the AGW hysteria has led to a scientific dead end that will almost certainly be abandoned soon. Now this is not to say that another ice age is imminent. The climate is not cooling significantly, it has reached a sort of steady state or flat line position since about 2007-08. If solar activity picks up or there is a strong El Nino event we could see another interval of warming. But at the rate that technology is already changing, I don’t think there is much to be done other than to accommodate ourselves to the relatively minor changes that all this might bring.
The Antarctic ice will not melt in this century or probably in this millennium. If all the arctic ice disappeared, we could probably offset that with massive desalination projects that would reduce sea levels and provide abundant water. That is the direction we should be going anyway. It is rather ridiculous to see California obsessing about drought when the natural variation in climate pretty much guaranteed that years like these would occur, and then look back to see that almost nothing was ever done to advance desalination projects in the past. What are we waiting for?