Global shipping depends on quality weather reports. Every single ship and plane (cars, trucks and trains too but y'know) needs accurate weather data very often to be on time. That's not to talk about agriculture or the people monitoring hurricanes to give evacuation orders.
Weather/Climate modelling is very complicated and complex, it is chaotic, if you want to look that up. That means we need a lot of precise and specific (or seemingly esoteric, like coronal mass ejections or CO2 concentration) data to have it. That's hard to do and you need costly equipment at remote locations, like Mauna Loa.
Many of the things that 0.001% of people don't care about are needed to maintain our quality of life. People don't care about these things because they don't have to - they are basic infrastructure that they can take for granted. Before COVID, how many people cared about rapid vaccine development during a pandemic? And how much worse would your life be now if the government hadn't spent a few of your precious tax dollars building the capacity to rapidly develop and roll out vaccines? How many people think about things like plant diseases, or nuclear security, or consumer product safety?
The funny thing is that if the government only did things that people cared about, the number of things that people would have to care about would skyrocket.
History has shown abundantly that companies will ignore risks that are small. If the risk materializes, just let the investors' money burn and found another company. Or if the company is big, just let the government step in and save your too-big-too-fail ass.
