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army1987 comments on [QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them? - Less Wrong
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It does seem extremely unlikely that global temperatures are optimized for human welfare, but not as hard to believe that human welfare is optimized for current global temperatures.
Why? Most of human evolution happened when it was colder than today, whereas much of human agricultural civilization happened when it was warmer (1, 2).
Is there a reason why you're limiting yourself to evolutionary innovations that occurred after human speciation? Most of our thermoregulation techniques are at least as old as the Triassic, which was much warmer.
Conversely, less elaborate adaptations can happen very quickly. The pale skin of Europeans seems to have originated after the end of the last ice age, for example.
It's also worth pointing out that our species seems to have been basically regional until about 60,000 years ago. So even if we limit ourselves to the last 200,000 years of adaptation, we should calibrate those expectations based on the African regional temperatures rather than a global average. Humans living in New England today may well be experiencing colder temperatures than their ice age ancestors.
It's likely that a disproportionate account of optimization of human welfare has occurred in the last few centuries. Moreover people are mobile and the variation in temperatures over the surface of the earth is greater than over a few thousand years. So humans are likely to have optimized their location to approximately optimize their welfare.
This is VERY technology-dependent.
Only a hundred years ago southern Florida was considered not a fit place for people to live in, being, basically, a swamp infested by alligators and malaria mosquitoes.
Population shifts in the last century have been ludicrously massive, with no real ill effect. If there's climatological reason, we can do so again.
If the shifts cost a few billion dollars, that likely would hard to measure. So I guess the question is what rises to "real" ill effects, and what is "ludicrously massive". I think most people would consider the shift in population from Africa to America during the seventeenth and eighteenth century to have involved significant real ill effect, and that involved only a small fraction of the global population.
The ill effect had very little to do with the shipping, and a whole lot to do with what was done with the people who were shipped. If the sugar plantations had been in Sierra Leone, it wouldn't have been any more humane.