I really don't like to play devil's advocate here since I do agree with HSF/exploration *on environmental grounds*, but here's a strong point:

Justification for HSF/exploration:
"The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next."

Justification for canning CxP in favor of (probably) more influence at SMD:
"The history of man is hung on a timeline of *resource exploitation* and this is what's next."

Exploration and resource exploitation - and I mean exploitation in its literal meaning, not in some negatively-laden connotation - are entwined as far back as we can imagine and certainly as far back as we can historically support. Exploration is the initial step toward resource acquisition. (And notice that "step" is, in English, inextricable from "progress," "advancement," etc.) This way of thinking has brought us incredibly far.

But this way of thinking has also brought us to the brink of disaster many times, sometimes over, but never before to a potential disaster as serious as the one we can imagine now. The risk trades on this one are terrifying. But I think the argument here is this:
1. A refocus to Earth/planetary science will yield known-meaningful, known-valuable advances, regardless of how useful our current climate models prove to be.
2. Technology will advance, especially through commercial spaceflight, regardless of government focus. Punting to the private sector is not crazy at this point, and may be beneficial.
3. No one else is going to do the science NASA already does; NASA capabilities are second to none and are a world resource at this point.
4. If our models do prove to be close to correct, then we need an Apollo-style focus on Earth science *now*... exploration can wait and that work may prove more efficient after just a few more years' development.

Just sayin'. I've worked on analogues and will be sad to see 'em go (though I don't think they should, there's no reason to stop researching ops concepts even with CxP cancelled).

The thing a lot of people seem to be missing here is that the two poles are very different. Yes, they are poles, and have some similarity in the style of their extremes. But Antarctica is a continent surrounded by oceans. The Arctic is primarily ocean.

There are two really obvious related factors in the Arctic. One factor is, oddly enough, the melting point of sea ice. And the frequently overlooked part of that is that *it's a state change*. At a threshold temperature, the stuff changes state. So subtle changes in the central tendency of an oscillation around the melting point can bring the system suddenly out of apparent equilibrium and into... feedback. One factor is albedo. With less reflection from the sea ice, there's more thermal absorption, which leads to less reflection... feedback.

The *real* problem with the global warming evidence is that it's more and more frequently explained in simplistic terms by people who don't understand it, resulting in backlash. There are also a ton of advocacy people out there who lack actual scientific background. These are really complicated systems, and one of the reasons we model them is that they're too complicated for any one person to understand every single aspect; models are a sane way to integrate the results of studies requiring disparate expertise (or at least different people).

And yes, colder winters, longer summers, whatever... as you've pointed out, talking about this is useless without at least a clear and common reference. This story pulls one very interesting result out of context and into casual conversation. So I suppose I'll be going now. I would highly recommend a literature search to you. It's not difficult stuff to understand, experiment by experiment, it's just an incredibly complex set of interactions combined with frustrating (i.e. real-world) experimental conditions.