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Kalshi partners with The Weather Company to verify climate bets, drawing scientists’ concerns
ReKalshi partners with The Weather Company to verify climate bets, drawing scientists’ concerns
Kalshi’s new partnership with The Weather Company brings science-backed verification to weather prediction markets, but climate experts warn about gamification, manipulation risks, and desensitization to extreme weather dangers.
Prediction market platform Kalshi is teaming up with The Weather Company, the operator of the Weather Channel app and, to verify weather-related trades with what it calls “science-backed data.” The partnership will also place Kalshi’s real-time probability data on The Weather Company’s platforms, giving users a new way to see how markets are pricing weather risk. Kalshi frames the move as a tool for individuals and businesses to anticipate and manage how weather and climate affect their daily lives.
Climate scientists, however, are raising concerns about what happens when extreme weather becomes a tradable commodity. Climatologist Michael Mann said he is not a fan of what he calls the “betification” of the world, warning that it can create “perverse incentives” for bad actors. Prediction markets have already been linked to leaks, insider trading, and manipulation, including a recent incident in Paris where a Polymarket bet on temperature prompted French officials to investigate possible tampering with weather monitoring equipment after a French weather service filed a report.
Kalshi, unlike Polymarket, is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The company says it prohibits insider trading and uses AI surveillance to track irregular or suspicious activity. Kalshi spokesperson Laura Frank said the platform does not list wildfire markets because they could create perverse incentives, drawing a parallel to its bans on markets involving war, death, and terrorism. The company did not clarify how the deadly impact of heat squares with its prohibition on death markets, even though heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States.
Beyond manipulation, experts worry that betting on weather could desensitize people to real-world dangers. Kaitlyn Trudeau, a climate scientist with Climate Central, said she does not think prediction markets are intentionally trying to make light of death, but she would not blame someone who has lost a loved one to heat-related causes for seeing it that way. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, described a potential “moral hazard,” where users could become hyper-focused on winning bets while ignoring the actual consequences of the extreme events they wager on.
There is some evidence that climate betting could have the opposite effect. A 2025 study highlighted by Columbia Business School found that people who placed bets on climate-related questions, such as whether July would be the hottest month in a decade or whether CO2 levels would surpass a specific threshold, began exploring climate science to make more informed bets and grew more concerned about climate change. Trudeau, who was not involved in that research, acknowledged the potential is interesting but remained cautious. She said she worries that rewarding people for betting on climate events, even if only through a dopamine response, could push society further away from recognizing the immediate threat of the climate crisis.
Betting on weather is not a new phenomenon. The Nenana Ice Classic in Alaska, for example, has long invited participants to guess the exact moment ice breaks up on the Tanana River. But the scale and accessibility of modern prediction markets, combined with official verification from a major weather data provider, mark a significant shift in how these wagers are framed and consumed.
