[Happy Monkey]

Not a lie; a good way, in print, to answer the meat of an argument, without sacrificing the detail.

It's a common tactic of various science deniers to make a statement that is technically true, but misleading or irrelevant. If debating an honest scientist, that scientist then has to say "yes, but..." which rhetorically reads as ceding the point, even in the unlikely event that they do get the time to fill out the "but". In text, you can say no, with an asterisk.

By your reading of his statement, it was baloney because he knew she wasn't asking whether climate changes at all. Answering something that is technically true based on a strict reading of the question may be par for the course for politicians, but that doesn't mean it's not baloney.

And based on Phil Plait's reading of the statement (and he's reading it as shorthand for arguments made by ), it's baloney because of the bad science implied by it.

It's baloney on one or both of those levels. The only way it can be read as honest is if you think Huckabee had no idea what she was asking about.

It's like if a politician in a chemical plant's pocket is asked about the death rate downstream from the plant, and he answers "people die all the time". Technically true, but nonresponsive.