Is Charles Koch a climate change denier? Charles Koch would say youre asking the wrong question.

Obviously, if the temperature continues to go up, at some point it can be harmful or even very harmful, the billionaire Republican megadonor said during an interview last week on Freakonomics Radio . But the question is, What do we do about it, about whatever risk there is? And to me, the answer is innovation.

There are natural causes and then there are causes due to increase in greenhouse gases such as CO2, being the biggest one, he added.

On the face of it, that admission may seem like a shift coming from a man who, with his brother David, bankrolled a conservative movement bent on hacking away environmental regulations and helped transform the GOP into the only major political party in the developed world to deny the overwhelming evidence of manmade global warming. But, to scientists, Koch remains a climate pariah who has learned how to temper his message for audiences who dont buy into the view that industry players are somehow more credible than impartial researchers.

Its just no longer credible to deny out of hand that climate change is happening or even that its human-caused, Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University and co-author of a new book on climate change denialism, told HuffPost on Monday. So the forces of denial the special interests, the polluting interests have instead turned to a new talking point that they think they might be able to get away with.