Climate of the Past www.clim-past.net 1814-9324 1814-9332 2 1 2006 10.5194/cp-2-31-2006 http://www.clim-past.net/2/31/2006/ http://www.clim-past.net/2/31/2006/cp-2-31-2006.html http://www.clim-past.net/2/31/2006/cp-2-31-2006.pdf 31 42 2006-06-30 Effect of land albedo, CO₂, orography, and oceanic heat transport on extreme climates V. Romanova romanova@ifm.uni-hamburg.de G. Lohmann K. Grosfeld Institute of Oceanography, University of Hamburg, 20146 Hamburg, Germany Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, 27515 Bremerhaven, Germany Department of Physics, University of Bremen, Otto-Hahn-Allee, 330440 Bremen, Germany Using an atmospheric general circulation model of intermediate complexity coupled to a sea ice – slab ocean model, we perform a number of sensitivity experiments under present-day orbital conditions and geographical distribution to assess the possibility that land albedo, atmospheric CO₂, orography and oceanic heat transport may cause an ice-covered Earth. Changing only one boundary or initial condition, the model produces solutions with at least some ice-free oceans in the low latitudes. Using some combination of these forcing parameters, a full Earth's glaciation is obtained. We find that the most significant factor leading to an ice-covered Earth is the high land albedo in combination with initial temperatures set equal to the freezing point. Oceanic heat transport and orography play only a minor role for the climate state. Extremely low concentrations of CO₂ also appear to be insufficient to provoke a runaway ice-albedo feedback, but the strong deviations in surface air temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere point to the existence of a strong nonlinearity in the system. Finally, we argue that the initial condition determines whether the system can go into a completely ice covered state, indicating multiple equilibria, a feature known from simple energy balance models. 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