Maybe CO2 isn't causing melting ice caps on its own.

Melting ice is usually what comes to mind when someone says the phrase "global warming".   We draw a conclusion, from our experience in the world, that warm air causes ice to melt.  As children we saw this time and time again in our own experiments with ice cubes taken from the freezer.  So, as adults, we therefore draw the same conclusions and we don't consider anything else a possibility?

Right now there is an epic battle of minds over whether or not warm air, caused by changes in CO2 in the atmosphere, is the cause of drastic changes in the landscapes at the Earths poles.   Nobody can actually come up with any proof that the air on our planet has warmed by more than 2 degrees.   Scientists can find some evidence of global warming but none of them has been able to find enough evidence of a quantity high enough to say with absolute certainty that it is the cause of diminishing artic ice sheets.

Up until this point it is a rare occurrence for anyone in the news media to suggest that lower humidity, or dryer air, is the cause of the abrupt disappearance of so much ice.   With so much global deforestation it is hard to understand why humidity isn't an effect that scientists include in their arguments on the subject. 

At 385 parts per million, rising in this century from only 300 ppm, CO2 makes up 0.385% of our air.   Scientists claim that this rise from 0.300% to 0.385% is enough to cause multiple percentage point changes in temperature.   While that may be possible, what sort of scientific principle accounts for a 0.085% increase in the share of CO2 in our air causing 2-5% changes in Earth temperature?  A hidden contributing factor is obviously missing from that argument.

We already know that rain forests are the lungs of the earth.  We know that vegetative tundra can store massive amounts of water and air humidity is higher in places where you are close the the ocean or where there is inland vegetation.

Air currents that feed moisture to the artic poles travels over land sometimes before it falls in the form of snow.   Continents change the moisture content in the air when the ocean air moves over them.  Before air reaches the south pole it may pick up or lose some of its humidity as it passes over barren stretches of cannibalized earth.  It could be that diminishing ice caps are due to a smaller amount of snow falling each year and not because of warming temperature at all.

I don't know what the real answers are but I hope that scientists and the news media take a more through and broad view of the nature of global warming instead of focusing on one of its aspects.  Since when did environmentalists practically abandon their fight against deforestation and turn instead to oil and CO2?  The truth is more complex and involves many other factors and we shouldn't ignore them.