Living with climate change

Tim Worstall at the ASI blog has an interesting argument from climate change to freer trade. It goes like this:

1. It may well be easier to help people adapt to climate change than try to engage in planet-scale engineering.
2. The poor will be most imperilled by climate change.
3. This is evidently true because poor people have fewer disposable resources, and therefore any danger they face must be faced with those fewer resources.
4. Hence, to help the most imperilled adapt better to climate change, we wish to see them get richer and have more disposable resources (this is also good in other ways, naturally).
5. The most sustainable, fairest and most rapid way to enrich the poor is to engage in trade with them, invest in their countries and so on.
6. All that we can do, from our side, is drop our trade barriers.

In other words, when people observe that the poor will lose most from climate change, we could try to stop climate change, or we could try to lift people out of poverty. Which is easier?