Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank writes that Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma is finding himself alone among Republicans on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in his position on global warming.

Milbank — in an opinion column headlined “A senator in a hostile climate” — reports from the committee’s meeting Tuesday that Republicans:

• Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said, “Eleven academies in industrialized countries say that climate change is real; humans have caused most of the recent warming. If fire chiefs of the same reputation told me my house was about to burn down, I’d buy some fire insurance.”

• David Vitter of Louisiana said that he, too, wants to “get us beyond high-carbon fuels” and “focus on conservation, nuclear, natural gas and new technologies like electric cars.”

• George Voinovich of Ohio said that climate change “is a serious and complex issue that deserves our full attention.”

Columnist Milbank — calling Inhofe a “flat earther” — quotes Inhofe:

“The science is more definitive than ever? You keep saying that because you want to believe it so much,” he said bitterly. He offered to furnish a list of scientists who once believed in climate change but “who are solidly on the other side right now.” The science, he said, “already has shifted” against global-warming theory. “Science is not settled! Everyone knows it’s not settled!”

The Senate committee hearing came one day after the Associated Press moved a news story by Science Writer Seth Borenstein headlined “AP IMPACT: Statisticians reject global cooling.”

That article came just days after a Pew Research Center poll reported that just 35% of Americans now say that global warming is a very serious problem — down from 44% in April 2008.

Borenstein’s AP article starts:

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

The case that the Earth might be cooling partly stems from recent weather. Last year was cooler than previous years. It’s been a while since the super-hot years of 1998 and 2005. So is this a longer climate trend or just weather’s normal ups and downs?

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.