Despite apocalyptic discourse surrounding climate change since the 1970s, climate and weather have a longer history of being conceptualized as useful entities in the Anglophone world. The adversities of the Great Depression and hopes for a better postwar future led to climate being designated as a limitless resource—an object integral to the national economy that organizations, most notably governments, could draw upon to operate more effectively, especially against adversity. With a resurgence of neo-Malthusian perspectives in the 1970s, fears over resource scarcity reframed atmospheric resources as being strictly limited, and the concurrent rise of environmentalism challenged the idea that the atmosphere should be seen as a useful entity for industry. Instead, the economy–atmosphere relationship increasingly began to be framed through climate impact assessments, which analyzed the ability of climatic changes to perturb human systems. In addition, economic fragmentation, marketization, and privatization challenged the concept of national resources, meaning that by the end of the 1980s, the idea of the atmospheric resource had fallen from vogue. In the context of such marketization, the meteorological applications industry experienced rapid growth, leading some to advocate seeing the sector as a weather forecasting enterprise to encourage a renewed integrated perspective on weather impacts, forecasts, and policy. In contrast, in 2015, scholars identified how climate change has been reconstructed as a market transition by political and business elites, as climate change came to be seen as a market opportunity that was disconnected from goings-on in the material atmosphere. This disconnection can be seen as the culmination of a long process of conceptually disintegrating economy from the material atmosphere that began with the dismantling of the atmospheric resource concept.
