Gaunt and nervous, with trembling hands, former head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) Phil Jones faced some uncomfortable questions from a parliamentary science committee yesterday. The Guardian seemed to think he got off more easily than he might have done, because the members felt sorry for him.

Jones did his best to persuade the Commons science and technology committee that all was well in the house of climate science. If they didn’t quite believe him, they didn’t have the heart to press the point. The man has had three months of hell, after all.

Jones’s general defence was that anything people didn’t like – the strong-arm tactics to silence critics, the cold-shouldering of freedom of information requests, the economy with data sharing – were all “standard practice” among climate scientists. “Maybe it should be, but it’s not.”

And he seemed to be right. The most startling observation came when he was asked how often scientists reviewing his papers for probity before publication asked to see details of his raw data, methodology and computer codes. “They’ve never asked,” he said.

He gave a little ground, and it was the only time the smile left the face of the vice-chancellor, Edward Acton: “I’ve written some awful emails,” Jones admitted. Nobody asked if, as claimed by British climate sceptic Doug Keenan, he had for two decades suppressed evidence of the unreliability of key temperature data from China.

But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.

Nor did the MPs probe how conflicts of interest have become routine in Jones’s world of analysing and reconstructing past temperatures. How, as the emails reveal, Jones found himself intemperately reviewing papers that sought to criticise his own work. And then, should the papers somehow get into print, judging what place they should have in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he and his fellow emails held senior positions.

But the committee will be hard pressed to ignore the issue after the intervention of no less a body than the Institute of Physics. In 13 coruscating paragraphs of written evidence to MPs, it spoke of “prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, “manipulation of the publication and peer review system”, and “intolerance to challenge … which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process.” Ouch.

Want to make crème anglaise the easy way? Just get a Thermonix. What red-blooded American consumer can turn down one of these?

5:46 video.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Elizabeth Vargas of ABC News interviews Lamar Alexander (R- TN) on the democrat attempt to use reconciliation to pass the health care bill.

The democrats seem willing to destroy themselves for socialism, and as Lamar Alexander promises, we’ll run candidates promising to repeal it.

2:49 video

VARGAS: You had said in your opening remarks at the health care summit, you quoted Senator Byrd when you said—you called on the president to renounce using reconciliation to push the bill through the Senate with a simple majority vote, saying, quote, “It would be an outrage to run the health care bill through the Senate like a freight train with this process.”

Why—why are you so opposed to this, given the fact that Republicans have used reconciliation more often than Democrats in the past?

ALEXANDER: Well, the outraged words were Senator Byrd’s words, not mine.

VARGAS: True…

ALEXANDER: You’re correct. The reconciliation procedure is a—where you use legislative (ph) procedure is a (ph)—where you use—legislative procedure 19 times it’s been used. It’s for the purpose of taxing and spending and—and reducing deficits.

But the difference here is that there’s never been anything of this size and magnitude and complexity run through the Senate in this way. There are a lot of technical problems with it, which we could discuss. It would turn the Senate—it would really be the end of the United States Senate as a protector of minority rights, as a place where you have to get consensus, instead of just a partisan majority, and it would be a political kamikaze mission for the Democratic Party if they jam this through after the American people have been saying, look, we’re trying to tell you in every way we know how, in elections, in surveys, in town hall meetings, we don’t want this bill. ....

VARGAS: When you say political kamikaze, are you saying that if the Democrats push this through, they will lose all their seats in November? I mean, what are we talking about here?

ALEXANDER: Well, here’s what I think. I mean, the people are saying, “We don’t want it,” and the Democrats are saying, “We don’t care. We’re going to pass it anyway.” And so for the next three months, Washington will be consumed with the Democrats trying to jam this through in a very messy procedure an unpopular health care bill.

And then for the rest of the year, we’re going to be involved in a campaign to repeal it. And every Democratic candidate in the country is going to be defined by this unpopular health care bill at a time when the real issues are jobs, terror and debt.

Parliamentarian of the Senate, Alan Frumin

The Wall Street Journal explains that it is far from a foregone conclusion that the attempt to ram the health care bill through via Reconciliation will be possible.

That arcane maneuver will have to survive the scrutiny of a theoretically independent official charged with enforcing the rules of the Senate, the Senate parliamentarian.

The drama over health-care legislation is reaching a critical stage, and soon the spotlight may land on Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin.

Mr. Frumin is usually offstage, standing on the chamber dais whispering with the presiding officer about obscure points of Senate procedure. To lawmakers rushing to finish their long-stalled health bill, however, the $170,000-a-year Senate appointee suddenly has attained outsize prominence and power.

That is because Democratic senators, who unexpectedly lost their filibuster-proof majority in January, are relying on arcane congressional budget rules to complete the health-care revamp.

Those budget rules promise a huge procedural advantage by avoiding filibusters that require 60 votes to overcome.

But there is a big catch: Anything that is in a budget bill has to have a budget purpose. If not, the provision can be challenged under the “Byrd rule,” named for Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat.

And Mr. Frumin, as the parliamentarian, must decide whether the Byrd rule has been met.

Thus, in a series of tense private meetings known informally as “Byrd baths,” it is Mr. Frumin who will determine what stays in the legislation and what goes, according to people who have taken part in the past. (Provisions that are cut become “Byrd droppings.”) Mr. Frumin’s decisions could dictate whether the health-care overhaul will gain momentum or collapse.

Byrd-bath meetings, which are held in the parliamentarian’s cubbyhole office in the Capitol, can drag on for hours as lawmakers and staffers make their cases. Running debates can stretch over weeks.

“The whole [Byrd rule] process in my experience as parliamentarian is a rather wrenching one,” said Robert Dove, Mr. Frumin’s predecessor. “It’s just long and grueling.…I don’t envy him.”

The parliamentarian and his staff “are under huge pressure,” said Sen. Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican. “There are 100 elected senators and one parliamentarian, and the parliamentarian can determine what the 100 can do.”

Among the policies that could be bounced by the Byrd rule are a number of changes to how the insurance market operates. Mr. Dove expressed skepticism that the budget shortcuts were well-suited for such efforts.

“When [the budget process] is used to jam things through on a very narrow basis, that’s when it runs into problems,” he said. Still, “it’s so handy for any party that doesn’t have 60 votes.…so it’s a very tempting tool.”

Mr. Frumin, 63 years old, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

That health care bill sure looks like Byrd droppings to me.