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.
