Global cooling wrote their 1971 paper, climatologists had not yet recognized the significance of greenhouse gases other than water vapor and carbon dioxide, such as methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons. Early in that decade, carbon dioxide was the only widely studied human-influenced greenhouse gas. The attention drawn to atmospheric gases in the 1970s stimulated many discoveries in subsequent decades. As the temperature pattern changed, global cooling was of waning interest by 1979. A common argument used to dispute the significance of human caused climate change, which TIME Magazine calls the Ice Age Fallacy, is to allege that scientists showed concerns about global
Carbon dioxide combustion of all carbon-based fuels, such as methane (natural gas), petroleum distillates (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, propane), coal, wood and generic organic matter produces carbon dioxide and, except in the case of pure carbon, water. As an example, the chemical reaction between methane and oxygen: It is produced by thermal decomposition of limestone, by heating (calcining) at about , in the manufacture of quicklime (calcium oxide, ), a compound that has many industrial uses: Iron is reduced from its oxides with coke in a blast furnace, producing pig iron and carbon dioxide: Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of the industrial production