No, you're the one speaking about the telescope, while it's not really the point.
Meteorologist have been working there since the 1960s. I'm sure you have some understanding of the conplexity of weather and the precision problems with chaotic systems.
Mauna Loa has been producing quality data since the 60s and has the means (including telescopes) to gather quality data to do quality analysis.
We didn't just strap a telescope to a building - the people in the observatory are not looking at a thermometer, a CO2 meter and then checking out asteroids by the by. Everything they do is to have quality analysis.
The works had been refined over all this time. That's why theres a telescope. Because it's pertinent.
And indeed there are good reasons to do so - many of the observatories were decommissioned starting in 2010 I believe, a long process - care to share anything that would show that's the case here?
To me this is a state of the art meteorological observatory. Unless proven otherwise, we should keep it going.
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.
There are good reasons to shut down telescopes, including age, outdated technology, and deprecation.