Climate experts warn that US Kalshi and Polymarket users are ‘gamifying disasters’ as they bet on events like heatwaves and daily temperatures
Online prediction markets, saturated by money staked on sport, crypto and politics, have now set their sights on a promising new area of growth: betting on the future livability of the planet itself.
The rise of gamified predictions on the unfolding climate crisis, and shorter-term weather forecasts, has been underscored by a new deal that allows Kalshi, a leading online financial exchange, to access data from the Weather Company, owner of the Weather Channel, to verify weather-related betting outcomes.
The weather is “one of the fastest-growing and most crucial categories” at Kalshi, the company said, with monetized predictions made by people, and bots, on weather and climate events growing 500% in the past year into a $1.1bn market.
“The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” Tarek Mansour, co-founder of Kalshi, said of the company’s broader objectives last year.
Startlingly, Kalshi even claims that this gauge of public opinion can not only act as a financial hedge for businesses exposed to extreme weather, but also help shape the weather forecasts themselves. Kalshi’s betting markets will appear on the Weather Channel’s app, which is used by more than 330 million people worldwide.
“Given the severity of the climate crisis, it’s crucial for policymakers and the general public to have well-calibrated forecasting data about future climate impacts,” said a Kalshi spokesperson, citing a company study on how accurate its markets’ predictions are. Asked whether this meant Kalshi saw its weather markets as part of delivering well-calibrated forecasting data, the spokesperson said this was the case.
“Weather is the ultimate equalizer – it fundamentally affects everyone and everything,” the spokesperson said.
People visiting Kalshi or Polymarket, its main rival, can bet on weather predictions such as how hot it will be in certain places on a given day, as well as longer-term bets – from how many climate-fueled disasters the US will have, to whether the world will avoid catastrophic global heating, to how severe the die-off of corals in Hawaii will be.
You can even wager how far Lake Mead, the US’s largest reservoir and a crucial water source for the American west, will drop below its already record-low levels. Last year, amid ruinous wildfires in Los Angeles, there were $1.2m in bets laid on Polymarket on the extent of the fires, with one user posting that “volume so high in this market it cause another fire”.
While Polymarket’s international platform still hosts wildfire bets, US consumers are barred from accessing them. Kalshi meanwhile has never offered wildfire markets, citing “perverse incentives”.
Distinctions can be hard to draw, though – the websites will allow betting on, for example, the severity of heatwaves in Phoenix, Arizona, even though up to 500 deaths in Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, are being investigated as possibly heat-related. Excessive heat is the biggest killer among extreme weather events in the US.
For scientists and people affected by climate-related disasters, though, it has been troubling to see the painful consequences of an overheating world turned into an online money-making market.
When the Eaton fire swept through Los Angeles county last year, killing at least 19 people and razing thousands of buildings, the home of Kaitlyn Trudeau’s grandfather was among those destroyed.
While he was unhurt, Trudeau, a climate scientist at the non-profit Climate Central, said it “left a bad taste in my mouth imagining people making money off it. People were posting ‘that was fun, until next time!’ I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt a bit.
