While the global impacts of anthropogenic climate change are well established, there remains substantial uncertainty in climate projections at the regional scale, which are critical for long-term planning for climate adaptation. Uncertainty in regional climate change arises primarily from uncertain changes in the global atmospheric circulation, which redistributes heat and moisture between regions. In this talk, I will (1) show how changes in the global atmospheric circulation are tightly linked to the pattern of ocean warming, (2) present evidence of a systematic climate model bias in recent ocean temperature and atmospheric circulation trends, discuss potential causes of this bias, and discuss what it means for the pattern of climate change expected in the coming decades, and (3) discuss the potential for higher-resolution climate models to improve climate projections of ocean warming patterns and their influence on the atmospheric circulation.