I posted about this on my G+ feed a while back; at some point, we went from being told about Global Warming to being warned about Climate Change.
The reason for that is that people equate "Global Warming" with "hot summers". That's bogus. The greenhouse effect isn't about direct sunlight; it prevents heat from escaping; therefore it affects low temperatures more than it affects high temperatures, and it affects winter more than it affects summer. The Arctic and Antarctic are the places that are changing the most drastically, and that's far removed from your average Joe's day to day "ermigahrd its sooo hot" experience.
But warming the poles more than the temperate latitudes evens out the temperature difference between them, and that has huge consequences from a weather standpoint. Temperature differences drive the jet streams; a polar jet stream is a 100mph~200mph river of air that circles the planet 5 miles up, and if you live in a temperate latitude (e.g. the US, Europe, China, south Australia) then a polar jet streams is responsible for everything nice about your weather. A polar jet stream blocks cold dry air from plunging equatorward (and warm moist air from surging poleward), and it also shepherds weather systems from west to east, forcing them to keep moving. Without a jet stream, weather would just sit in place for weeks or months at a time, causing droughts or flooding depending on whether a high pressure system or a low pressure system decided to set up shop over your head. (Either possibility is a disaster for agriculture and local ecology.) But thanks to CO2-induced polar warming, the jet streams have been creeping equatorward a little bit each year and they've been weakening. With weaker jet streams, we can expect things like polar vortex plunges and balmy temperatures in Alaska and 15%-of-normal-rainfall droughts in California and 115 F heat waves in Australia to become regular occurrences. (These things are all happening right now, if you haven't been paying attention, and they're all a consequence of polar jet stream shenanigans, which are getting more common and more extreme as of late.)
Like the jet streams, ocean currents are also driven by temperature differences, so ocean currents will eventually start to shift if polar warming continues. That will have far-reaching consequences, because ocean currents determine evaporation rates and thus where precipitation falls, but ocean current changes are very hard to predict because we have so little data to work from. This hasn't really affected us yet, but the El Niño vs La Niña dichotomy (drought vs flooding; where you live determines which one brings which) gives a small taste of how much power the ocean has over the weather (and how big the effect will be once we do get our first permanent ocean current shifts). That awful The Day After Tomorrow film was mostly made of bogus-science-from-hell, but it was very loosely based on a real-world hypothesis that freshwater glacial melt could disrupt the thermohaline circulation that powers the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that keeps the UK and northern Europe warm. (The UK is at the same latitude as the Gulf of Alaska, suggesting it would be as cold as Alaska if the Gulf Stream were disrupted. The Gulf Stream weakened 30% from 1957 to 2005, which causes some concern.)
It's also worth noting that the changes are being buffered by the ocean, but that's not without consequence either. The ocean has been absorbing tremendous amounts of CO2, and that has seriously reduced CO2's greenhouse warming impact and bought us time before the Arctic temperature situation gets completely out of hand. But when CO2 dissolves in water it forms carbonic acid (H2CO3) -- that's why flat soda tastes disgusting: carbonation adds acidity (tartness) -- and now the ocean's pH is getting so acidic that coral reefs are dying en masse. The loss of biodiversity dominoes up the food chain to fish that human industry cares about. Coral reef biodiversity has also been a fruitful source of drug discovery ideas, so the pharmaceutical industry will suffer a bit from coral reef deaths too. And beyond coral, the falling ocean pH is also hurting shellfish operations because the water is now too acidic for baby oysters to mineralize their shells. The Pacific Northwest's oyster industry has started suffering from this problem in the last couple of years and is now resorting to artificial hatcheries to stay in business. Expect to see the global shellfish industry in dire straits within the next decade or two.
The situation is horrendously complicated. There's no way you could summarize it with two English words, no matter how pithy. But "Climate Change" is a little closer to the reality than "Global Warming".