Everyone who has lived a few decades, or who ever had a chance to talk with someone who lived during the nineteenth century, as I did, knows that of course the climate is changing — the climate is always changing, human influences or not.

Logically, *everyone* should acknowledge “climate change.” Those Republicans who didn’t probably recognized that “climate change” is often used as a codeword for “global warming.”

And, there is a similar problem with “global warming.” When I was a kid back in the fifties, my great-grandmother told us how the country had warmed since the late 1800s when she was a kid. Again, everyone knew this – no political bias, just common “folk wisdom.”

The real issue is to what degree “global warming” is caused by humans and whether or not “global warming” will be a disaster.

I have often been accused of being a “denialist” because, as a Ph.D. physicist (Stanford, 1983) with a lot of experience in computer modeling in various fields who has followed climate-modeling efforts since the late ‘60s, I do not believe the GCMs have yet reached stable, quantitatively precise, well-confirmed conclusions. But, of course I do know that anthropogenic CO2 does make the globe warmer than it otherwise would have been.

I myself would answer “No” to simple-minded “global warming” questions simply because I know that “global warming” (and, now, even “climate change”) tends to be short-hand for “proven human-induced global warming that will end up having catastrophic results.” I am sure there is global-warming; I am not so sure it has yet been proven that it will have catastrophic results.

When you take all of this into account, you can see how what seems to be naïve ideologically-driven responses may in fact be the result of quite sophisticated understandings of how code-words and phrases are used and misused.

Even Republicans are more semantically sophisticated than academics often think!

Dave Miller in Sacramento