It's been a good year for climate skeptics. Not, mind you, because they've been vindicated at all on the merits. Quite the opposite: 2010 is shaping up to be the hottest year on record, Arctic sea ice continues to thin out, heat waves have been torching Russia, and nearly one-fifth of Pakistan has been submerged underwater. The science on global warming is still overwhelming. But politically, skepticism is at its zenith.

Consider: During the sweatiest U.S. summer in recorded history, and in the midst of a major oil catastrophe in the Gulf, the Senate didn't even bother to take a vote on a bill to limit carbon emissions. Skeptics managed to inflate the Climategate non-scandal into a breathless media event and launched a high-profile attack on the IPCC over—what was it again?—a minor misstatement about Himalayan glaciers. Republicans and coal-state Democrats are now trying to chip away at the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases, and in California, coal and gas companies are making a major push to repeal the state's sweeping climate law, AB32.

And here's the punch line. Next year, opponents of doing anything about global warming are likely to have a stronger hand still. The GOP will likely take the House and make substantial gains in the Senate, and these aren't green, cuddly Republicans. According to Think Progress, only one of the 37 Republican candidates for Senate supports climate action—Mike Castle in Delaware (and there's a non-trivial chance he could lose his primary today). The skeptic pressure on Republicans is immense: In Illinois, Mark Kirk previously voted for the Waxman-Markey climate bill in the House, but he now says he opposes cap-and-trade. Here's a sampling of what to expect from the new class:

Kentucky's Rand Paul: "Now Osama bin Laden had a quote yesterday. He’s says he’s after the climate change as well. It’s a bigger issue, we need to watch ‘em. Not only because it may or may not be true, but they’re making up their facts to fit their conclusions. They’ve already caught ‘em doing this.” Missouri's Roy Blunt: "There isn’t any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth." Nevada's Sharron Angle: "I don’t, however, buy into the whole … man-caused global warming, man-caused climate change mantra of the left. I believe that there’s not sound science to back that up."

It's no different in the House. Over at Daily Kos, RLMiller has been keeping tabs on the GOP's fresh crop of "climate zombies." In Arizona, for instance, Ruth McClung, who's running for Arizona's seventh congressional district, claims to have conducted her own independent investigation into the matter: "After researching the causes of temperature fluctuations on earth, I found the largest factor to be the sun." (Tragically, her research doesn't seem to have included noting that solar activity has been decreasing over the past decade while temperatures have been rising.)

Odds are, then, climate legislation will be pulseless for the next two years. In the House, Joe Barton may well reclaim the chair of the energy and commerce committee. Barton, recall, is the guy who apologized to BP in the wake of the oil spill, and the last time he ran the House energy committee, in 2005, he helped author a bill whose defining feature was billions of dollars in oil and coal subsidies. For most greens, simply preserving the status quo will be the rosiest scenario with Barton in charge. (And even if Barton, who is technically term-limited, doesn't get the chair, there's not a ton of daylight between him and the other Republican candidates.)