Young people are the ones closer to experiencing these imminent consequences. Despite this, age has been overlooked as a significant explanatory variable in the literature on climate change opinions. This article seeks to fill this gap. We synthesize different studies across psychology, social sciences, and biology to generate three versions of a standard rational actor model of a future-discounting agent whose shadow of the future is endogenous to their age. We then evaluate our expectations using data from the Climate Change in the American Mind survey spanning from 2008 to 2022, encompassing responses from over 30,000 participants. Our descriptive results mainly suggest a negative relationship between age and concern, but we also find evidence of a curvilinear relationship.

We disentangle age and cohort effects and find no significant cohort effects. In addition, we provide evidence regarding risk perceptions and the role of the information environment. Older participants exhibit heightened concern for the harm climate change may cause them personally compared to the harm it may have on the United States, developing nations, or future generations. They also anticipate climate-related harm to manifest sooner than younger participants. Finally, we find that younger individuals are not inherently more informed about climate change and that self-reported media exposure increases with age. While merely descriptive, our findings suggest scholars of climate change and policy-makers should consider age as an important variable in explaining climate change public opinion.