(Illustration found here).

Just as everything got worse, it did — dust blown thousands of miles is darkening ice on earth’s glaciers and in the Arctic, eliminating “albedo,” the process of ice reflecting sunlight, adding heat in the environment, and further/faster climate change.
From the Guardian today:

The phenomenon of “dark snow” is being recorded from the Himalayas to the Arctic as increasing amounts of dust from bare soil, soot from fires and ultra-fine particles of “black carbon” from industry and diesel engines are being whipped up and deposited sometimes thousands of miles away.
The result, say scientists, is a significant dimming of the brightness of the world’s snow and icefields, leading to a longer melt season, which in turn creates feedback where more solar heat is absorbed and the melting accelerates.
In a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of French government meteorologists has reported that the Arctic ice cap, which is thought to have lost an average of 12.9bn tonnes of ice a year between 1992 and 2010 due to general warming, may be losing an extra 27bn tonnes a year just because of dust, potentially adding several centimetres of sea-level rise by 2100.
Satellite measurements, say the authors, show that in the last 10 years the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet has considerably darkened during the melt season, which in some areas is now between six and 11 days longer per decade than it was 40 years ago.
As glaciers retreat and the snow cover disappears earlier in the year, so larger areas of bare soil are uncovered, which increases the dust erosion, scientists suggest.
…
Any reduction in albedo is a disaster, says Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Oceans Physics Group at Cambridge University.
He said: “Replacing an ice-covered surface, where the albedo may be 70 percent in summer, by an open-water surface with albedo less than 10 percent, causes more radiation to be absorbed by the Earth, causing an acceleration of warming.
“I have calculated that the albedo change from the disappearance of the last of the summer ice in 2012 was the equivalent to the effect of all the extra carbon dioxide that we have added to the atmosphere in the last 25 years,” he says.
UlyanaHorodyskyj, who is planning to return to the Himalayas to continue monitoring dust pollution at altitude, said she had been surprised by how bad it was.
“This is mostly manmade pollution,” she said.
“Governments must act, and people must become more aware of what is happening. It needs to be looked at properly.”

Yeah right.

And similar shit last month via National Geographic:

Wind storms that carry dirt off the deserts of the U.S. Southwest are darkening the snowpacks of the Colorado Rockies with layers of red dust, causing snow to melt up to six weeks earlier than in the 1880s.
This early snowmelt causes streams to swell earlier in spring before plants are ready to use the water, and streams run low later in the year when the water is most needed for drinking and irrigation.
But western snowpacks aren’t suffering from just dust and dirt.
Rising temperatures and lack of snow this winter in the Sierras and the Cascade Range signal an emerging “new normal” in the western United States.
On May 1, when researchers traveled to high mountain sites in the Sierras to measure snowpack, there was little snow to measure.
And researchers expect mountain snows to keep shrinking.
This week in early June, no snow remains at measuring locations in the Sierras, according to California’s Department of Water Resources.

A lot of bad shit needs to be “looked at properly,” and in a hurry.