The ARC: Thoughts on a Safe Climate Future

Hurricane Helene, which wreaked unprecedented damage (both in scope and location) in regions more than four hundred miles inland in North Carolina, makes landfall on September 26, 2024. Credit: CSU/CIRA & NOAA The United States has spent decades getting better at weathering hurricanes. Building codes have been strengthened, evacuation systems refined, forecasting windows extended and made more precise.

Climate systems in the Arctic are approaching critical tipping points and there is no coordinated, system-level plan to prepare for and respond to these risks. The Arctic Stabilization Initiative (ASI), a new stage-gated research program, has raised $6.5 million to advance the research needed to assess the safety, efficacy, and feasibility of Arctic-targeted climate interventions. Every country that sits on a major earthquake fault line maintains a disaster risk management and response plan.

Why it’s time to retire it and to come up with other terms and taxonomies for climate interventions The Labadie Power Plant is a 2,389.4-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Missouri. In 2023, it was the largest single point source of sulfur dioxide pollution in the U.S., emitting roughly 44,000 tons of SO₂. It likely remains one of, if not the largest, sources of sulfur dioxide pollution in the U.S. in 2026.

Tucked inside NATO’s latest 5% defense spending pledge is a once-in-a-generation chance to redefine what national security means over the remainder of the 21st century. National security is no longer just about who has the most advanced weapons, but who has the technology needed (or can develop it) to meaningfully reduce long-term global instability and avert conflicts from arising in the first place.

Seduction splashes across entire maps. Sharper lines that were once theoretical—shipping routes blocked by permanent ice, oil fields locked beneath permafrost—suddenly materialize. A new Northern Sea Route cuts 5,000 nautical miles off the trade route between Shanghai and Rotterdam. Reserves to the tune of ~90 billion barrels of oil and ~1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas become accessible underneath ice sheets and in seabeds.

Today, we’re thrilled to publish our first-ever guest post on the ARC Initiative substack, from someone who has been a great collaborator and supporter of our work: Kelly Erhart. Kelly is a close friend of ARC and the Climate Emergencies Forum (CEF), and a thoughtful voice working at the intersection of climate risk, planetary systems, and responsible innovation.

In advance of the 2008 financial crisis, financial firms like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch invested and underwrote significantly against flawed models that assumed low correlation among mortgage defaults. When defaults soared as the crisis began, contrary to their models’ predictions, senior tranches of debt thought to be “safe” became extremely risky, extremely quickly.

A note from the ARC team: This blog is part of a series of ambitious ideas to address catastrophic climate risks we’re publishing in the runup to New York Climate Week – check out our articles from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and if you’ll be at NYCW, let us know! We’re once again on the cusp of New York Climate Week, perhaps the largest recurring climate convening after COP, and certainly a consequential one as a nexus for discussion among decision makers, researchers, civil...

A note from the ARC team: As part of our NY climate week run-up, we’re excited to share a guest post by our partners at Deep Science Ventures on a joint project exploring opportunities to build resilience to catastrophic climate risks. Check out their work. In the face of the catastrophic changes to our environment from warming of 2 °C or greater, we have an opportunity to create technologies that could scale to be the basis of a fundamentally more sustainable, resilient civilisation.

A note from the ARC team: This blog is part of a series of ambitious ideas to address catastrophic climate risks we’re publishing in the runup to New York Climate Week – check out our articles from Monday and Tuesday, and if you’ll be at NYCW, let us know! Scientists have long warned that the Arctic, warming four times faster than the global average, is the critical bellwether of our climate crisis. Arctic summer sea ice could disappear as soon as the 2030s.