No.

Humans evolved adaptations to heat when proto-humans learned not to drag their knuckles across the savanah:

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Brown8/publication/234147519_Human_Heat_Tolerance_An_Anthropological_Perspective/links/00b49521512d5e4c42000000.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306456504000907

but being heat-adapted is different to being able to deal with increased mean global temperature:

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/21/9552.full

The problem is that in relative terms we’re already operating near the physiological ceiling for temperature when ≥2 ? annual extreme events are considered. Greg’s already indicated this – when it comes to heat mammals and especially humans are already bouncing around near the ceiling, and the ability to adapt to warm or cool mean-temperature cliamtes does not confer the ability to crash through the metabolic physics of heat dispersal.

Nice try to distract from the point but burying your head in the desert sand won’t change the direction in which the wind is blowing.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/india-heatwave-deaths-heatstroke-temperatures

Well, whatever. The huge problem with this presumption is that many other things fluctuate seasonally: availability of fresh food, access to physical activity or need for manual labor, parasite and pathogen loads, social activities including warfare and reproduction, sunlight exposure and vitamin D levels (a big one), etc. Attributing all excess deaths above a seasonal minimum to the harmful effects of imperfect temperature is utterly unjustified.

Second, I would bet that if they did look at each nation separately, they found different optimal temperatures in different countries, despite the limited and nonrepresentative range of countries included. It is a well-known fact that what temperatures you perceive as “too hot” or “too cold” are affected by your physical and cultural adaptations. People today regularly live in places where it gets hot enough that some doomers claim humans will be unable to survive in lands that become that hot due to climate change (and indeed, fat white AC-habituated people in T-shirts would die pretty fast out of doors there). Very possibly those people’s ideal temperature from a health perspective, if it could be identified, would be higher than that of the Lapplanders.

There are unfortunate practical and philosophical implications of the opinion they’re promoting. First, the attribution of all deaths above a yearly minimum to temperature variation teaches believers that we are awfully fragile flowers who can’t bear more than tiny environmental fluctuations before we start dropping over. This belief can only encourage the global wealthy to view high heating in the winter and aggressive air-conditioning as Needs (like my mother-in-law who “needs” to heat to 78 and then, blech, A/C down to 68). “You suggest setting the A/C higher and using a fan? Obviously you want to kill Granny! Death Panels!” It’s been argued that attempting to scare people into taking action on climate change is an ineffective tactic; if so, it’s especially futile to scare thanatophobic Americans in ways that encourage them to see health and life as dependent upon burning more fossil fuels.

Finally, a minor semantic or philosophical issue. One may suspect that any “excess” deaths that are genuinely attributable to non-extreme seasonal temperature variations are of frail individuals who would likely have died in the relatively near future anyway. This raises the question of whether we should view death rates as being “tragically increased” year-round except for a brief moment of “normalcy” in late spring, say, or “happily reduced” from normal during that specially salubrious season of late spring. I find the latter more congenial because (a) it does not encourage the common American delusion that mortality is optional, and (b) it does not encourage us to view the real world outside the glass windows as an inimical environment lying in wait to kill us. (This is good for environmentalism; you protect what you care about or perceive as beneficial, not what you perceive as dangerous to you, so people who just hide indoors in the nice safe heating and A/C do not end up being people who will sacrifice much to save the biosphere.)

How does the length of time from exposure to the onset of symptoms play into this? It would seem that the “lag time” needs to be large enough so that even when the infected travel by air they are able to get out and mingle in a new population before they go down.

When Christmas is white
The graveyard is lean;
But fat is the graveyard
When Christmas is green.

I always interpreted it to mean that a good, cold winter kills the germs, and I have wondered whether a warmer, moister climate means a lot of newer, warm-weather germs and insects to deliver disease. Add to that the US reluctance to keep up with infrastructure, and willingness to shut off people’s water service and you have the makings of pandemics that aren’t as scary as Ebola, but that could still kill a lot of unlucky people.

Likewise, “putting solar panels on your roof isn’t going to stop warming because China and India”. Well, maybe, but they will power the air conditioner to deal with the increased temperatures.

Mitigation and adaptation are remarkably congruent in many areas. We should emphasize this more in public discussions.