An article from Wired.com discusses the potential benefits of global warming.

Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, says that humanity has flourished in warmer periods.

But an activist takes issue with Peiser's claim, saying that a heat wave in 2003 killed thousands of people in Europe.

Dr. William Keatinge, an emeritus professor at Queen Mary School of Medicine and Dentistry, cast doubt on that assertion in the British Medical Journal, saying that "few of these deaths are recognisable clinically as being due to heat." Simple interventions are the best way to prevent the deaths of vulnerable people, such as the elderly, in hot weather. Moreover, Keatinge points out elsewhere that deaths from cold far exceed those from heat.