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December 28, 2006
Wanna Bet?British gamblers have the opportunity to bet on the climate. Bookmakers at Totesport have come up with a series of "global warming wagers". You can bet that a great white shark will be caught off the shores of Britain in 2007, that the Thames Barrier will be breached in London in the next decade or that 2007 will be the hottest year on record. Half of all profits made off global warming bets will be donated to Friends of the Earth.
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Comments (1)
Totesport looks disturbingly like a scam. It does not clearly define its various weather event contracts, so many of them are hard to interpret. Each one requires a definition for the uncertain event that both buyer and seller accept.
Assuming these uncertainties in measurement can be resolved, there are other problems. For example, Totesport offers 20:1 odds on a 20cm global sea level rise in 20 years. Now, a bet that doesn't resolve for 20 years is very unusual. The seller must offer significantly favorable odds just to cover uncertainty about inflation, plus account for the buyer's rate of time preference between current and future consumption.
I am more familiar with Tradesports (http://www.tradesports.com/). They do not offer any of the ambiguous bets found on Totesport. Weather betting is limited to this year's snowfall in Central Park, a bet that is resolvable soon and can be based on agreed-upon measurements.
Posted by Richard Belzer | December 28, 2006 2:17 PM