Will 2026 be the hottest year we’ve ever seen? You can bet on it—literally, on Kalshi.
The prediction market platform is now partnering with the Weather Co., which runs both the Weather Channel app and weather.com, to verify weather-related trades.
According to Kalshi, the move will provide “science-backed data” that allows both individuals and businesses to anticipate and manage “the ways weather and climate impact their daily lives.”
People who visit the Weather Co.’s app or website will also see Kalshi’s real-time probability data on those platforms, giving them “new ways to understand how markets are pricing weather risk.”
To climate experts, though, verifying and legitimizing bets about the weather comes with some concerns. (Kalshi itself does not use the term betting for activity on its platform; it refers to all activity as trading. Similarly, Kalshi calls its sports contracts swaps. A Nevada federal court, however, recently ruled that Kalshi cannot evade state gambling laws simply by using different language.)
Experts worry about the “gamification” of life-threatening weather events, the potential for manipulation and bad actors, and whether placing bets on the weather might actually distract people from the bigger, more necessary conversations around climate change.
Manipulation and bad actors
Climatologist Michael Mann says he isn’t a fan of what he calls the “betification” of our world because it can create “perverse incentives” from bad actors.
Already, prediction markets have been linked to leaks, insider trading, and manipulation—even around weather.
In April, a Polymarket bet on the temperature in Paris prompted French officials to investigate whether someone tampered with weather monitoring equipment after a French weather service filed a report.
UnPolymarket, however, Kalshi is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Kalshi says it prohibits insider trading and uses AI surveillance to track irregular or suspicious activity.
Verifying bets via the Weather Co. adds another layer to avoid such situations. In the Paris case, for example, no other weather stations in the area recorded that temperature spike.
And whether 2026 is the hottest year on record, or what the highest temperature will be in Los Angeles on a given day—another example of a weather-related contract on Kalshi—aren’t incidents that one individual can control.
Aside from any potential manipulation, though, Mann says turning weather events into prediction market fodder “will only fan the conspiracy theories about geoengineering, cloud seeding, and the idea that scientists or state actors are manipulating weather to create extreme events.”
Desensitizing people to the risks of weather events
Climate scientists express concern that wildfires, which often are started by humans, pose a particular risk for bad actors on prediction markets. Kalshi says it does not list wildfire markets (though people have placed wildfire bets on Polymarket).
“Kalshi is a federally regulated platform, and just we don’t allow markets on war, death, and terrorism, we also don’t allow markets on wildfires because they can create perverse incentives,” Laura Frank, a Kalshi spokesperson, tells Fast Company.
Heat, however, is actually the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States. Climate experts are already frustrated at how “fun-in-the-sun” media coverage makes light of heat wave risks; betting on heat could be another way to downplay those risks.
Kalshi did not clarify how the deadly impact of heat squares with its prohibition on death markets.
“I don’t think prediction markets are intentionally trying to make light of death,” says Kaitlyn Trudeau, a climate scientist with Climate Central, a nonprofit focused on climate change communication. “But I also wouldn’t blame someone who has lost someone to a heat-related death and sees it differently.”
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, sees potential for what he calls “some moral hazard,” noting, “I can imagine [users] could get desensitized to the lived realities of the people and places damaged or destroyed in the extreme events they bet on, as they could become hyperfocused on ‘winning the bet’ without paying attention to the actual real-world consequences.”
We all have a stake in weather
Conversely, could tapping into prediction markets and getting people financially connected to climate change actually make them more aware—and concerned—about weather dangers?
A 2025 study suggests that’s possible.
People who placed bets on things whether July would be the hottest month in a decade or if CO2 levels would surpass a specific threshold began to explore climate science to make more informed bets, and even grew more concerned about climate change, according to a Columbia Business School write-up of the research.
Trudeau, who was not involved in that research, believes the potential is interesting. Still, she worries that many people already have cognitive dissonance around climate change.
The idea that climate change is a problem for future generations to solve, or that it’s only affecting places far away, is one of the biggest challenges to getting people to take the phenomenon seriously, experts say.
“I worry that by betting on these events and turning it into something that rewards people, even if it’s just the dopamine in their brain, it will further push us away from the very real and immediate threat of the climate crisis,” Trudeau says.
A history of climate bets
Betting on climate change or weather events actually isn’t new. The Nenana Ice Classic in Alaska, for example, in which thousands of people bet on the exact day and time that the ice on the Tanana River will break up in the spring, dates back more than 100 years.
Leiserowitz, who has studied this event, says it’s an example of the “wisdom of crowds effect,” in which groups of people tend to make more accurate predictions than individuals—but with a climate change angle. The date of when all that ice breaks up has shifted over time to earlier in the spring due to climate change.
It’s that “wisdom of crowds” that Kalshi says it’s trying to tap into with weather trades.
Businesses have used the platform to hedge against extreme heat, per Kalshi. One ice cream shop owner placed bets around rain or cold snaps as a way to make money when less-than-stellar weather hurts ice cream sales.
Weather trades may also reveal what the public really thinks about climate change, cutting through the partisan noise that can cloud such conversations.
In 2005, climate scientist James Annan made a $10,000 bet with climate deniers that the Earth would continue warming through 2017. It was just one of a handful of climate bets he’s made with people who reject climate science.
The losers of that bet never paid out, and one climate denier would agree to participate only if they got 50-to-1 odds.
To Annan, it underscored how detractors are “willing to speak boldly without evidence—as long as it doesn’t cost them any money,” Politico reported at the time.
Bets won’t protect us from the impact of climate change
Still, bringing such bets to Kalshi—the world’s largest prediction market, with an $11 billion valuation and more than $500 million in weather market trading volume in 2026—is a different beast.
Kalshi’s climate and weather vertical has grown 500% year over year, pacing toward $1.1 billion in annualized volume.
With all this activity, and now with the Weather Co. verifying trades, Kalshi says its prediction market will provide and empower people with accurate weather data.
“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,” Frank says.
To climate experts, the idea that prediction markets should be the source of such data is questionable, particularly at a time when trusted institutions the National Weather Service have been defunded, disrupting climate and weather data for the public at large.
“You know where lots of good and accurate climate and weather data come from? NOAA, and other government agencies that have been decimated by the Trump administration,” Mann says, pointing out that Donald Trump Jr. is a paid strategic adviser to Kalshi.
As prediction market bets get incorporated into media coverage, this could affect how news outlets cover climate and weather events, too, though exactly how is yet to be seen.
And at a time when the country is rolling back climate protections and doubling down on fossil fuels, turning the weather into a bet isn’t exactly the best climate conversation to have.
“While there’s nothing inherently wrong about these prediction markets, I think it’s important we’re clear about what they can and cannot do,” Trudeau says. “Will they protect us from climate change? I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Sumber Artikel:
Fastcompany.com
