Discussion about climate change often focuses on the future. People talk about the world we’re handing to our children and grandchildren. They worry about food, water, and physical security, and scientists work to predict what will happen to ecosystems around the globe.

But what if we talked about the past instead—about getting back to the way things used to be? Researchers Matthew Baldwin and Joris Lammers at the University of Cologne, Germany, got volunteers to do just that in a series of experiments. They found that framing discussions and messages this way may help reduce climate change skepticism among political conservatives, who tend to be less likely than liberals to accept the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.

Baldwin and Lammers took cues from previous research, which suggested that conservatives tend to be concerned with preserving the past, while liberals would like to replace current systems with ones they think would be better. As such, they hypothesized that conservatives may be resistant to environmental messaging that focuses on disrupting the status quo because of speculations about the future. This would mean that climate change skepticism may not result as much from “an inherent disbelief in scientific evidence,” they write, but rather to this difference in emphasis and perspective.