The work in this dissertation brings a focus on climate variability and global teleconnections to inform adaptation planning and explore the risks of emerging climate intervention technologies. In the first half of the dissertation, I demonstrate a modeling framework for evaluating the global risks of a regional climate intervention, demonstrating how physical pathways for potential teleconnections can be identified using global climate models. I pair this analysis with an evaluation of the regulatory landscape for research on climate cooling techniques, tracing out a complex landscape of physical and geopolitical risks that will govern the development of climate intervention technologies. In the second half of the dissertation, I evaluate how features of global climate change drive regional impacts and use this understanding to evaluate global climate models for adaptation planning in California, showing how incorporating measurements of large-scale atmospheric circulation along with measurements of local climate model performance can lead to more robust and decision-relevant climate model evaluation.