Ice deforms as a plastic material when its thickness is about 30-40 m of ice. This means that the ice can move by the ice body deforming akin to a dough. Hence the changes in glacier thickness due to accumulation and melting can be counteracted by the glacier moving excess mass from the upper part of the glacier to its lower part.

As long as the climate is stable the glacier will receive roughly the same amount of snow every year and the loss of ice from melting would also be constant over years. The glacier will then be stable in size because the glacier flow compensates the gains and losses in different areas every year.

If we get a change in climate the amount of snow accumulation and the melting will change due to changes in winter precipitation and summer temperature. This will affect the amounts of excess and deficit in the upper and lower parts of the glacier and also its dynamics.

Looking at the terminus of the glacier we can view this as follows. A stable glacier is one where the melting at the terminus is compensated by ice flow replacing the ice loss by moving new ice into the position of the ice lost. If the melt at the terminus is larger (due to warming), then the ice loss will be larger than the ice flow trying to compensate the loss and the glacier terminus retreats. Note that ice flow continues (down valley) while the glacier retreats up-valley. For a climate cooling the melt decreases and ice will over-compensate the loss giving an advance of the glacier.

Hence the answer is that you cannot split dynamics from climate in the response of a glacier. The simple description above can be complicated further but that is probably worthy of a course in glaciology or deeper study of a book on glaciology such as The Physics of Glaciers by Kurt Cuffey and W.S.B. Paterson (Academic Press 2006).