Climate Central: The extreme 2012 Central Great Plains drought was more intense than the Dust Bowl era droughts of the 1930s, according to a new federal assessment of the origins and predictability of the drought, released on Thursday. The team of 19 atmospheric scientists, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), found that global warming may have played a relatively small contributing role by helping to make the drought slightly warmer, and hence drier, than it otherwise might have been....