[PaulDavisThe1st]

> This is why "climate change" is a better term than "global warming."

Indeed. The way I currently tend to think about the difference in my head is this: human activity has caused a large amount of extra energy to remain inside the atmosphere. Some of it is in the atmosphere itself, some in the oceans and lakes, some in ice, some in land. You can't trivially predict what a lot of extra energy will do when it ends up in such different storage "media". The obvious conclusion is "global warming", but there's no inherent reason for that to be correct. The extra energy could, for example, all go it into generating humungous sized and crazy fast storm systems, which would result in little change in temperature but very noticeable changes in weather and safety.

Of course, it is unlikely that all the extra energy will be directed into a single phenomena, but the example is enough for me to remember that it's really non-trivial to understand what it could do, let alone predict what it will do.