Bets on sites like Kalshi extend far beyond day-to-day temperatures. 

Current markets include “whether the EU will meet its climate goals in 2030” and whether “the world will pass two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels before 2050.” Some are proposed by Kalshi’s market team; others by users. But there are limits. “We cannot have markets on wildfires because a human could set or accelerate a wildfire,” said Such. “We don’t want to create a financial incentive for people to start fires.” Other platforms, he notes, have allowed such bets, including on the California wildfires. 

There’s no doubt that climate betting sits in ethically fraught territory. It depends on public science to potentially enrich a handful of people. And, in some cases, it also veers into markets that speculate on catastrophe. Hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes—events that devastate lives—become reduced to betting odds on certain sites. For many, that crosses a line.

Some bettors draw it themselves. Mark Johnson* said he bets on high temperatures, but not on hurricanes. “It feels off,” he said. Disasters like hurricanes and wildfires tend to hit the poorest and most vulnerable communities hardest. For Johnson, wagering on everyday weather is a game of skill, but putting money on a storm that could destroy homes and take lives crosses into exploitation. 

Others are less certain. “I don’t want to say I’m excited about hurricanes because obviously I don’t want people to lose their property or anything like that,” said Scott Owens, a long-term trader. “But it’s really kind of fun forecasting the hurricane strength and whether or not it’s going to make landfall.”

In short, betting on disaster is where the moral ground starts to give way. Critics say it trivializes human suffering, while supporters counter that the same markets could serve a purpose by sharpening forecasts or even shifting public attitudes. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that betting on daily temperatures can influence how people think about climate change, according to a 2023 study in Nature Climate Change. One experiment with 664 participants showed that those who placed bets on climate outcomes became more concerned and knowledgeable about climate change, and more willing to support action to address it, regardless of whether they won.

“Everyone gambled the same way, Republicans, Democrats, deniers, and believers,” Dr. Moran Cerf, lead author of the study and director of the Center for Advanced Technology at Columbia University, told Atmos. “At some point they all said, ‘I don’t care about what I actually believe. Here there’s easy money.’” The effect was modest—only 1% to 7% of attitude shifts could be attributed to betting—but, as Cerf and his co-authors wrote, even such small changes could add up across millions of people.

Money, Such argues, helps strip politics from these markets. “The fact that people have money on the line makes them incentivized to get to the truth,” he said. Still, politics can’t be completely avoided. When the Trump administration cut funding to the National Weather Service and NOAA, it affected Kalshi bettors. One trader, Scott Evans, who moves between $150,000 and $200,000 a year across multiple markets, said the cuts forced him to find other data sources or change his strategy. “If the data is being changed to fit a narrative, are you predicting what the actual number is? Or are you predicting what they say the number is?” Evans asked. 

Politics isn’t the only fault line. Most traders are in the U.S., but many bets often hinge on global climate outcomes. That creates a gap: Profits flow mainly to wealthy individuals in rich countries while poorer nations bear the brunt of climate costs. And like the climate data itself, the system is only as reliable as the institutions behind it—institutions for which funding and priorities can shift with each administration.

Beyond politics, traders argue that betting can drive improvements in forecasting—though doing so often means pushing public data into uses the scientists who produce it never anticipated.

Joel Montrose,* a 30-year-old with a master’s in geoscience, sees himself as part of that shift. He began betting in late 2024, focusing on daily temperatures and monthly climate data. Miami is his preferred market because its weather is stable enough to model, though that also makes it harder to gain an edge. Until recently, he wagered $200 to $500 a day—sometimes clearing $3,000—but he paused his betting to teach himself Python and build a forecasting model. “The amount of money getting poured into it is actually much higher than the budget for any professional agency doing this,” he said. “It’s probably being used terribly inefficiently. But it’s encouraging people to make advancements in forecasting.”

Those advancements often depend on exploiting obscure corners of public datasets. Montrose pulls some of his data from Mesonets, regional climate sensor networks, operators of which were surprised to learn their data was fueling betting markets. Daryl Herzmann, systems analyst for Iowa State’s Iowa Environmental Mesonet website, only discovered the practice after a flood of emails arrived from traders confused by temperature discrepancies. The reason, Herzmann explained, was his use of an obscure NOAA product called the Daily Summary Message, which offers earlier and more precise readings than the agency’s standard releases. “It’s basically the cheat code for what the high temperature is likely going to be,” he said. Even small differences, like a temperature rounded from 71 to 72 degrees, can be enough to tip a wager.

The difference, Herzmann explained, came from his use of an obscure NOAA product called the Daily Summary Message. Released a few hours earlier than standard reports, it offers more precise readings—“basically the cheat code for what the high temperature is likely going to be,” he said. Other NOAA datasets convert Fahrenheit to Celsius and back again, introducing rounding errors that can shift a wager by a degree.

But rounding isn’t the only problem. Weather stations themselves have measurement errors, according to John Horel, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Utah whose research helped create the Mesowest Mesonet. A 1- to 2-degree Fahrenheit error “would be a very low error” for a weather station, Horel said, but could be catastrophic for a bettor. Mesowest’s “data is provisional,” he said. “It’s not a climate record.” 

That hasn’t stopped a new generation of traders from chasing hidden edges and exposing just how opaque the system can be. Tucker Keating,* a software engineer in New York City, began betting on Kalshi in late 2024. “I loved being like, Yes, I’m betting on the elements. I’m a master of the universe,” Keating said. Convinced he could gain an “informational edge,” he built a script to scrape temperature data from public websites faster than competitors.

His search revealed how little visibility there is into official reporting. Kalshi’s high-temperature data for New York comes from a Central Park sensor known as KNYC, which posts publicly only once an hour. Yet traders were placing large bets minutes beforehand, suggesting someone had access to data others could not. Keating tried everything. Trekking to the sensor at Belvedere Castle, applying for restricted NOAA datasets with a borrowed academic email. Yet he still couldn’t find the sub-hour readings he suspected existed. He eventually gave up. 

It turns out that weather data, like the climate itself, is fractured, incomplete, and contested terrain. For traders, that creates suspicion of unfair advantages. For scientists, it means potentially valuable information is underused. And for society, it raises a harder question: Who gets to profit from knowledge about the climate future we all share—and what does it mean when that future becomes just another market to bet on?