Glaciers and Ice Ages

Today's Chron features an article about mountain climbers' perspectives on global warming.

I recently took a natural history course at Merritt college that included a study of the last ice age during which the Great Lakes were formed in the midwestern U.S. This got me thinking of glaciers and ice ages. Some scientists point to recurring ice ages as an explanation of how global warming will eventually lead to the next "Ice Age". This process involves massive movement of water vapor from the equator to the poles and then freezing of this vapor in the form of new glaciers. But, the process takes place over thousands of years and is accompanied by massive shifts of climate. So I don't see it as any sign of hope.

For reference, I also dug up information on ice sheets on Wikipedia:

Antarctic Ice Sheet
30 million cubic km of ice. Around 90% of the fresh water on the Earth's surface is held in the ice sheet, an amount equivalent to 70 m of water in the world's oceans.

Greenland Ice Sheet
the second largest ice body in the world, after the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The thickness is generally more than 2 km (see picture) and over 3 km at its thickest point. The volume of ice is 2.85 million km3.
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Recently, fears have grown that continued global warming will make the Greenland Ice Sheet cross a threshold where long-term melting of the ice sheet is inevitable. Climate models project that local warming in Greenland will exceed 3 degrees Celsius during this century. Ice sheet models project that such a warming would initiate the long-term melting of the ice sheet, leading to a complete melting of the ice sheet (over centuries), resulting in a global sea level rise of about seven meters [ACIA, 2004]. Such a rise would inundate almost every major coastal city in the world. How fast the melt would eventually occur is a matter of discussion. In [IPCC, 2001], the expected 3 degrees warming at the end of the century would, if kept from rising further, result in about 1 meter sea level rise over the next millennium.