The loose network of far-right think tanks and the reclusive billionaires who fund them helped convince Donald Trump to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate treaty. The administration is passing a wish list of policies boosting the fossil fuel industry and escalating its rollback of climate research. Trump's Environmental Protection Agency this June killed one of America's most far-reaching and effective climate laws, the Clean Power Plan, and replaced it with something much weaker.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank co-founded by fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch, this May shut down a science program that for years has questioned the consensus that humans are responsible for warming the Earth's atmosphere.

Trump earlier this year tweeted a quote from a Fox & Friends guest claiming that “the whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science.” The president also said in June that “climate change goes both ways.” However, even with a vocal climate change denier in the White House, the movement is in the midst of fundamental changes.

"They're not in great shape right now. They're cranky, they feel like they're being ignored and overlooked—they are—and they're as discredited as they've ever been," said Connor Gibson, a researcher for Greenpeace's investigation team. "The only thing is, we're currently living in the upside down… They've never had a more receptive president."

Is the movement that for over two decades spread doubt and uncertainty about climate science finally receding? Or is it merely updating its approach and tactics for an era when public concern about the climate emergency is rising ? Either way, experts argued, deniers are not projecting confidence or cohesion.

But those who track and investigate climate deniers told VICE the movement itself appears to be in flux. Veteran deniers are being pushed out, fossil fuel funding is harder to come by and longtime policy goals are for now out of reach. They're suing each other for hundreds of thousands of dollars and attacking companies like Exxon as "alarmist" sell-outs.

This isn't a one-off setback for the movement, though. In July, the White House said it would shelve plans for an "adversarial" review of climate science. That frustrated Myron Ebell, a prominent denier who had led Trump's EPA transition team. He complained to E&E news that the long-held goal of forcing mainstream scientists to publicly defend their basic findings against a government-sponsored team of deniers has "been totally stymied by the forces of darkness within the administration, but also by the looming election campaign."

Still, he cautions against reading too much into it. He and other denier trackers don't know if the Kochs cut off funding to the program, or whether it was merely a clash of personalities. Scientists like Michaels may simply resume their work at another organization. "We're still trying to suss it out," he said.

People who track the denial movement were caught off guard by the departures. "It was a bit of a shock to a lot of us," said Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center. "When that came through, we were like, 'Woah, that's different, that's new.'"

"They informed me that they didn't think their vision of a think tank was in the science business, and so I said, 'OK, bye,'" Pat Michaels, the climate skeptic and frequent Fox News guest who oversaw the program, told E&E News . Other well-known figures in the movement, including Richard Lindzen and Ryan Maue, have also departed the Cato Institute.

Penn State atmospheric scientist Michael Mann speculated the Koch brothers and other fossil fuel companies have little interest in the blowback that could come from a "full-frontal attack on the science" hosted by the White House. "I think their decision is they don't need to do that, they're getting everything they want, why stir up a hornet's nest," said Mann, who has been a frequent target of deniers and recently won a lawsuit against a Canadian group that had accused him of fraud.

A high-profile forum on whether climate change is real could rally the hardcore denier base—which represents about 9 percent of the U.S. population—but would unlikely be well-received by the growing numbers of Americans worrying about climate change. Polling from Yale suggests that 29 percent of people are now "alarmed" about record wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and other extreme impacts of a warming planet, compared to 14 percent who felt that way back in 2013.

"That is where they truly are losing ground," Gibson said of climate deniers. "Even though politically they have way more power than they should, they are losing credibility in the culture and they know that."

They are also losing support—at least in public—from oil and gas companies. The most dramatic example of this came last year when Exxon quit a corporate lobby group known as the American Legislative Exchange Council. One of ALEC's members, the climate-denying Heartland Institute, supported a resolution asking the lobby group to go after something called "the endangerment finding." This is an EPA policy that acknowledges that carbon emissions are dangerous and creates a legal foundation for regulating them.