I thought climate change was preferred as being more accurate than global warming, since not all regions will be warmer, some will actually become colder as things like the jet stream evolve.

Average people don't understand local variability or averages. They hear "global warming" and think that means every place must be hot at once. There's the stellar example of a congress critter bringing a snowball in and claiming that disproved global warming. Now, climate chaos or something like that might be a better way to convey what's in store. Average people need to understand it better as simply energy added to a system making it increasingly unstable and unpredictable.

> You could start calling it global warming.

Except that the planet has been warming and cooling for millions of years.

To put into perspective:

Age of Earth: 4.6 billion years

How long Dinosaurs lived: 400 million years

Age of humans: 200,000 years.

The human species is literally less than a blip on the earth's historical radar. I'm convinced whatever we do to the planet, it will recover, like it always has. Humans not adapting? That's the real problem.

That particular ship, and the inherent confusion caused by people not understanding that weather isn't climate, has long sailed.

Recently people have been suggesting "climate crisis" which isn't going to help on the "less frightening" aspect, but I think that's a feature.

The Guardian’s current styleguide suggests “global heating” instead of “global warming”, and “climate emergency” to replace “climate change”.

I think more semantic arguments only detract from action at this point. It's already an "emergency" according to a number of official organizations.

Showing more physical evidence and pushing developed plans is the only way forward I can see.

I always thought that "climate change" was coined to be harder to dispute for laypeople. A global warming denier can point to a chilly day, or a day of snow, and say "some global warming, huh?" because they are ignorant of the concept of global average temperature. Much harder when the it's phrased as climate change — snow certainly isn't warm, but can one really argue that it is a counterargument to the existence of change?

Climate apocalypse.

The economy is inseparable from the climate issue. The way humanity conducts itself economically greatly determines the scale of emissions we produce through energy use, agriculture, concrete production, land use, etc. There is no way to maintain indefinite growth to sustain such an economy on a finite planet. We overproduce and inefficiently distribute or waste goods. All of that energy consumes fossil fuels. There's no way to address the climate issue adequately without also addressing economic incentives, short of us stumbling on some magical technology that allows massive net negative carbon capture from the atmosphere. Nothing like that exists, and we're far past the point where planting trees will make that math work out. Just asking everyone nicely to please consume less, or pleading with the fossil fuel industry to please stop pumping disinformation out in order to continue reaping profit, is not going to cut it. This economic engine still runs on oil and we need a new one very quickly. The excess that flows as wealth mainly and increasingly to those who already have far too much is brought about by cheap energy, labor, and automation. That party is about to end, both due to increasing cost of fossil fuel extraction and the climate turning hostile.

Nuclear and some Geo engineering presumably.

It's quite possible that we have already passed the threshold for triggering feedbacks that make cutting consumption insufficient to ward off cataclysm. The permafrost is one, among many others that we're still discovering. Even if industrial civilization stopped on a dime today, it's quite possible that we've already initiated a runaway hothouse scenario. That only becomes more likely the more we emit. Technology will be necessary to mitigate and adapt, and so switching our energy systems to carbon neutral is the first of many steps. Consumption will also have to come down, but I don't imagine many places will manage to do it voluntarily. Perhaps some more pro-social, community oriented countries will do so, but the more hyper-capitalist, individualist countries will likely fight tooth and nail to continue consuming until nature forces an end to it. Classic tragedy of the commons, except the commons is our only known habitable biosphere.