A person cools off with water from an open fire hydrant during a heat wave on the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, on July 2. AFP-TNS

We live in an era when people will invest hard-earned dollars in a stock simply because an anonymous Redditor with a handle like “looksmaxxingtrader” posts “We need to save Wendy’s” or some such. But when it comes to the weather, most of us still demand more information before committing to an outfit, an outing or, more important, preparing for a natural disaster.

So it is somewhat alarming to learn that the U.S. weather-forecasting system, long the envy of the world, is gathering notably less information than it once did, thanks to the Trump administration’s budget and staffing cuts. Meteorology is not in r/wallstreetbets territory; nobody has yet been able to measure a related decline in forecast quality. But meteorologists warn the risk is rising that we will miss extreme turns in weather.

That could cost all of us a lot in unnecessary deaths, property losses and economic disruption. And, of course, that pain will be felt most quickly and broadly in a home-insurance market that is already in crisis.

“Insurance is fundamentally a prediction business,” Anthony Lopez, the chief executive officer of the Miami-based Your Insurance Attorney, told me. “The less confidence insurers have in predicting the weather or events, the more expensive insurance is going to become. That uncertainty gets priced into your policy.”

Two recent news reports, one from Gizmodo and another from Politico, said that meteorologists and emergency managers........

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