I encourage you to read “Facing the Climate Crisis without Hysteria,” the latest Huffington Post piece by Steven A. Cohen, who is the executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute and whose career, including long stints at the Environmental Protection Agency, has given him an excellent vantage point on the mix of regulation, motivation, prosperity and innovation that drives environmental progress.

The piece appropriately decries caricatured, baseless attacks on climate science by conservative ideologues and those seeking to delay a shift away from fossil fuels. But Cohen also criticizes climate campaigners and some in the media for responding with oversimplified predictions of environmental doom. Here’s an excerpt and link, with some more background on Cohen:

I think the questioning of science by the American right wing and the political assaults funded by their rich benefactors are proving to be a distraction to those interested in moving the planet to a path of sustainable economic growth. It is turning analysts into advocates and advocates into hysterics. The IPCC report focused a great deal of attention on solutions, but the media accounts of the report focused on the possibility of food shortages. Here we go again: Chicken Little’s sky is falling in. Climate and ecological impacts are creating deep problems in agriculture. While there is no question that these are real problems, as in the past these will likely be addressed by new technologies and new techniques that will overcome the problems we now face.

The glass is either half empty or half full. I choose to believe it is half full. The history of the technological age we are in is that technology both creates unforeseen problems and then sets about solving them. My bet is on human ingenuity. Maybe the U.S. federal government was not capable of building a website to handle the traffic generated by the Obamacare deadline, but Amazon’s website copes pretty well with the massive traffic it generates in the days before Christmas. Maybe we can’t stop the sea waters from rising, but we can place our utility rooms on the second floor instead of the basement. As for agriculture and the food supply, it is always a bad idea to bet against the technology of food production.

I suspect we will survive, because we are not suicidal.

Like many, I’m sure, I’ve been much more familiar with the climate and energy policy preferences of Jeffrey Sachs, the institute’s director. The best recent representation of Sachs’s views is the paper he and others co-authored with James E. Hansen, the longtime NASA climate scientist who now has a climate policy position at Columbia, in which they build on Hansen’s longstanding call for a rising price on carbon.

To capture the full scope of thinking on this question, I think it’s important to consider Cohen’s ideas, too.