"How the hell do they know that it didn't melt faster or grow faster than they think in the past?"
By looking into Ice cores, which I belive you described once as a silly waste of time.
Ice cores reveil the quantity of snowfall and what the atmosphere was like at this and that time back to several thousand years. In antarctica, uou can go as far back as 740.000 years.
(Link:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040611080100.htm)
Anyway, give or take some cycles of temperature changes, we are seeing melting on both caps, which have not occured for a VERY long time, nothing so small as our periodic swings in temperature. Measure the temp in Texas as you like, there is no way getting arount what the big result is.
This:
"Why is the globe not heating at any rate that is unusual? It has heated and cooled at higher rates in the past... "
Yeah, but you have to go MILLIONS of years back to match the last 100 or so. So, back to dino times, - that is indeed news IMHO. So, the globe is indeed heating (and thereby melting ice) at an unusual rate. The sun curve follows the heat curve, but not at the same angle I'm afraid....
This:
"and... what happened to the ice age these chicken littles predicted to cover North Amercia by the year 2000? where are these "scientists" now? they took their grant money and ran... no one is holding them accountable now."
Apart from predictions of the possibility of a "nuclear" winter, I completely missed these predictions, and I did my metreology studies in the 80's. Maybe it was a rather American thing like the warming denialism?