Dear author, co-authors;
I have read carefully the reviews of your ms, submitted for publication in ESD, as well as your response to those reviews. I also read again the ms to critically check on some of the issues raised by the two reviewers. They both especially address the issue on the role/representation of atmospheric energy transport. Reviewer #1 seems to appreciate the overall contents of the ms and supports publication after having addressed a number of some more major and minor issues. Reviewer #2 also appreciates the contents of the ms but has found some serious issues including some errors in the calculations of the atmospheric energy budget/input and raises as an additional serious issue the fact that the presented model results do not reflect an equilibrium state solution of the model. These comments imply that some additional substantial work has to be done on a modified/improved modelling system/set-up. You indicate in your response that you have already tackled some of the raised comments and that it doesn't seem to qualitatively affect the results of this study. Having now this two different reviews and your response, I would like to invite you to indeed produce a revised version of the paper including those modified model results as well as your modifications to tackle the list of comments. I will then invite both reviewers to review again that revision to arrive at my final decision on publication of this ms in ESD,

Regards, Laurens Ganzeveld

Dear author, co-authors, I have received a review of your substantially revised paper by one of the reviewers of the first version of your paper and now accept the paper for publication in ESD after you have dealt with the last required technical corrections. As you can see, this reviewer had still some comments on specific features of your paper. However, I also agree with the statement on demonstrating the merits on application of such simplified modelling systems to test these hypotheses on paleoclimate dynamics such as Snowball Earth. The indicated missing features of this paper could then be potentially included in follow-up studies,

Regards, Laurens Ganzeveld