If you despise the oil industry why would you contemplate getting a job like that?
you could become a vulkanologist or a seismologist and save lives on the long term...
or you could become a soil expert (i believe through minor geography) and make the environment and peoples life better by determining if a soil is polluted or not.
you can become a structural geologist and do stuff like mountain management, by example you decide where the safest spot for a road is or you could examine current structures such as tunnels, powercables and even skilifts to determine wether or not they're still in a safe spot..
(you can also do safety management and blow up hazardous rocks <- is nice! )
You can also become a hydrologist and manag drinkwater supplies around the world (a friend of mine is currently mapping deep watertables in congo that could be drilled to provide drinkwater to the indigenous people)
And if you minor geography as well you can become a glaciologist and research glaciers or ice on the northpole or something..
or you could become, as you mentioned, an expert in climatology and perhaps enter the global warming debate and provide new usefull insights...
(altough i still think global warming is still overrated and is in fact a coincidence of several factors, including ofcourse greenhouse gasses from human origin...)
so you see; geology is definately more than just "rock" and depending on what path you choose in your later years you can start doing completely different stuff just to say, i have a friend who's currently in Bali (thailand) researching the dynamics of the beach ; serious, he just spends days on the beach, chilling, taking soil samples and stuff...
or what looks like a sweet job as well is cartography; you go measure up the land and then you draw a map of it; how cool is that?!
