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Description: Factors that contribute to the well-established ideology gap in climate change beliefs (i.e. conservatives’ scepticism about climate change and its severity) remain underexplored. In the present research, we propose that there are differences in temporal orientation and perception between conservatives and liberals which, in part, contribute to this gap. Across three studies (total N = 654) in the Netherlands and the UK, we demonstrate that conservatives tend to consider future consequences of their behaviour less than liberals and perceive the effects of climate change as further away in the future. Furthermore, we find that this tendency can partially explain higher levels of scepticism about climate change on the conservative side of the ideological spectrum. Besides contributing to a better understanding of this ideology bias, these results have implications for climate change communication.