Climate Change: The Forgotten Issue Of This Year's Election

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Hidden Brain Losing Alaska Encore of Episode 27: Losing Alaska Listen · 25:55 25:55

Of all the things that have come up during this election cycle — from immigration to the size of one candidate's hands — one issue that didn't get much air time was climate change.

"We tend to be very focused on the short term," explains George Marshall, Director of Projects at Climate Outreach and author of Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. "We tend to discount [...] things happening in the future the further away they are."

In this week's encore episode, Shankar Vedantam takes us to the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska to explore why it's so difficult for us to wrap our heads around climate change.

The Hidden Brain podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.