As President Barack Obama and world leaders build momentum toward an international climate agreement next month in Paris, Republican lawmakers are digging in their heels deeper than ever.

GOP Senators on Tuesday night voted 52-46 in two largely symbolic, mostly party-line votes to scuttle Obama's global warming efforts. Meanwhile, in the House, Republican lawmakers continued working to arrange closed-door, deposition-like interviews of government climate scientists whose recent findings refuted a common plank of climate change denial.

"The Obama administration is putting facts and compassion to the side in order to advance their ideological agenda," Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on the Senate floor Tuesday, alleging that the administration's environmental regulations will lead to "higher energy bills and lost jobs."

One of Tuesday's resolutions aims to block the Clean Power Plan, the first federal rule limiting heat-trapping carbon emissions from existing power plants. The other resolution targets regulation for new power plants.

The measures have virtually no chance of advancing further. In a lengthy statement Tuesday on the Clean Power Plan resolution of disapproval, the White House promised a veto, declaring that it threatens "the health and economic welfare of future generations by blocking important standards to reduce carbon pollution from the power sector."

Nonetheless, coming less than two weeks ahead of a major U.N. climate summit in Paris – where Obama hopes to achieve an international agreement to reduce countries' emissions and slow climate change – the Senate's vote effectively signals to the world that Obama's climate policies lack support among many lawmakers at home.

"We must remain vigilant in guarding against their expansion by an administration that appears to be more focused on striking a deal on climate change with the United Nations than meeting the energy needs of Americans," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican and chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said of the rules.

Across Capitol Hill, actions by the head of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee also have highlighted Republican opposition to climate action. Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, hopes to force climate scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into closed-door interviews with committee staffers and to turn over thousands of emails on their research.

Earlier this year, the scientists published a study in the journal Science showing greater evidence that global warming has not gone on hiatus as deniers have claimed. It said the earth had warmed at least as fast in the past 15 years as it did in the last 50 years of the 20th century.

Smith, who has often peddled the idea of a global warming hiatus ­– including in an April op-ed in The Wall Street Journal – accuses the scientists of rigging their data.

"It appears federal employees at NOAA altered historical temperature data to get politically correct results and now refuse to reveal how those decisions were made," Smith said in a statement. "Rather than cooperate with legitimate congressional oversight, NOAA has politicized these requests to build a false narrative that the Committee seeks to intimidate scientists."

NOAA maintains that the agency has been "transparent and cooperative with the committee over the past couple months to help them understand the research and methodologies that were used," spokeswoman Ciaran Clayton says.

Attorney and Georgetown University law professor David Vladeck, who previously represented climate scientist Michael Mann during a similar congressional investigation, contends the goal of the current inquiry is not more transparency – especially in the lead-up to the Paris summit.