A new study published Monday suggests human-caused climate warming is driving the drought that has crippled much of California, NBC News reported. Even though rainfall patterns remain essentially the same as 120 years ago, warmer temperatures are both drying out the soil and causing rain to fall instead of snow, reducing the snowpack essential for irrigation in one of America's top agricultural states. "Human emissions of greenhouse gases have increased the probability that when low precipitation years occur, that they occur with a warm environment," said Noah Diffenbaugh, the study's lead author and a climate scientist at Stanford University.
