An examination is made of the impact of a layer of particulate matter, assumed to be ice crystals, on the albedo of the polar region. The model is time dependent, includes the growth of the layer, and incorporates the diffuse nature of radiation reflected from the surface and atmosphere. Although the magnitude less than previous results, the impact is one of heating instead of cooling. It is also shown that ignoring the diffuse nature of the radiation reflected from the underlying earth-atmosphere system, as has been done in many previous simple models, can result in overstimation of the climatological impact of aerosols in sign and magnitude by a factor of up 4--6.