Newt Gingrich Kills Climate Science Chapter To Appease Limbaugh Listeners

With the Iowa caucus looming, Newt Gingrich told a Rush Limbaugh listener he has killed a chapter by a conservative climate scientist that recognizes the reality of global warming. The book, being edited by Gingrich’s Contract with the Earth co-author Terry Maple, was to have an essay by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. She was asked in 2007 by Maple to provide “a good opening chapter that lays out the facts on global climate change,” and submitted her chapter in 2009. After the Los Angeles Times broke the story that Gingrich had a climate science book on tap, Limbaugh skewered Gingrich and the “babe named Hayhoe.”

Confronted by a Limbaugh listener, Gingrich blamed an anonymous third party for requesting the chapter, and said “we told them to kill it,” CBS News reports:

The climate-change issue arose Thursday night at a Gingrich campaign stop in Carroll, when a woman expressed concern to Gingrich about the chapter. She said she had heard about it on Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. As she began to tell Gingrich who the author of the piece would be, Gingrich interrupted. “That’s not going to be in the book,” he told her. “We didn’t know that they were doing that and we told them to kill it.”

Watch it:

“Good,” the climate denier responded. “That sounds a good idea because why would you want to have somebody like that in there?”

Gingrich and his co-author Terry Maple never told Hayhoe — a professor at Texas Tech University, mother, and evangelical Christian — that her chapter would be junked. Hayhoe was dismayed by the “ungracious” way she found out that her work was being discarded.

“Nice to hear that Gingrich is tossing my #climate chapter in the trash,” Hayhoe tweeted in response to the news. “100+ unpaid hours I could’ve spent playing w my baby.”