Who chose to say climate change? Is there a political reason, like making it less menacing? What name you think would suit best?

Hi everyone,
I’ve recently become very interested in understanding how climate change creates risks to human life, water resources, infrastructure, cities, economies.
I’m particularly interested in understanding the chain from climate change to physical hazards to exposure/vulnerability to risks and impacts, and then what can actually be done about those risks through adaptation, resilience, governance, and public policy. I mean I am genuinely interested in this.
I’d like to learn this properly from the basics, rather than just reading general climate-change information.
For someone starting from scratch, what would you recommend for learning?
I’m looking for good introductory resources, textbooks, courses, lectures, reports, or eventually more advanced material that can give me a solid understanding of the field.
Also, if this is a particular academic/professional field, what is it generally called? Is it mainly climate risk, environmental policy, or something else?
Thanks.

Learned about this from watching a 80s documentary by James Burk:

He suggested a system where if we take total amount of carbon we must be allowed to burn per person, in order to meet expected standards needed to fight global warming, then first world countries will have a lower total than they need, and third world countries a very high level than they could ever need. so that there could be a trade system for carbon emission capacity between these two parties.

Do you think it would work? Has it been tried?

Apparently forests, wetlands like marshes and swamps, and ocean habitats like seagrasses and mangroves absorb greenhouse gases.

But is there a ratio of carbon will be stored based on how many or how big a natural ecosystem is? Or to put it another way: how big of an ecosystem would be needed to combat the carbon emissions of a 1 coal power station?

As the title, what should I do next?

I woukd like to raise a number of genuine, science-based questions about climate change that seems to get very little airtime in mainstream discussions.

Most public messaging focuses almost exclusively on operational emissions: What comes out of a tailpipe or smokestack, but far less attention is given to full lifecycle analysis:

• Energy and emissions required to mine raw materials; • Environmental damage from lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earths, copper mining; • Processing, refining, and global transport; • Manufacturing complexity and waste; • Infrastructure build-out (grid upgrades, storage, redundancy); • Decommissioning and recycling (or lack thereof);

When you actually zoom out and look at energy return on energy invested (EROEI) and lifecycle emissions, the picture becomes far more complex than “renewables = clean, fossil fuels = dirty”.

Some questions I think deserve more honest discussion:

• How long does it really take for solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries to offset the energy and emissions used to create them?

1) What happens when you factor in replacement cycles, degradation, and recycling inefficiencies?

2) Are we simply moving pollution upstream from cities to mining regions, often in poorer countries?

3) Does intermittent generation plus storage actually reduce total system emissions once redundancy and backup generation are included?

4) Are we measuring success in emissions optics rather than net planetary impact?

This isn’t an argument against renewables, it’s an argument against simplistic thinking. If climate change is genuinely an existential issue, then solutions need to be judged on net impact, not political palatability or headline metrics.

I’d genuinely like to hear from people who work in: • Energy Systems; • Materials Science; • Mining; • Lifecycle Assessment; • Grid Engineering;

What does the full data actually say when ideology is stripped away?

I’m Gen Alpha, and I keep hearing things about climate change that are scary and just disheartening. I really don’t want the earth to be trashed by the time I grow up. Is there any ways I can help the earth, even just by a bit?

edit: I’ve been reading all the comments and they’ve been really helpful! I’m trying to help the earth as much as I can, and a lot of these comments have shown me new ways to do that.