Water contamination in an energy balance model of climate with coupled iceline

Abstract Budyko's energy balance model with coupled iceline is a historic system of differential equations, which incorporates water albedo as a major determinant to climate trends. In this class of models, the position of the Earth's iceline, and its coupling with temperature, play a very important role in determining long term climate patterns (which may range between extremes such as a water covered or an ice covered Earth, but also allow for stable states with intermediate icelines). Some extensions of this model have specifically focused on studying the contribution of greenhouse effects to the temperature-iceline long term dynamics. Our model builds upon this existing work, and studies in a computational setup the potential effects of global perturbations in ocean water purity. We found that small changes in physical parameters such as water salinity or chemical/biological contamination may lead to sizeable changes in long term climatic outcomes. Moreover, these effects appear to be enhanced when occurring in combination, and even more so when in the presence of elevated greenhouse effects.