All eyes in California have been on Oroville Dam, where a broken spillway forced major evacuations. But the damage from winter storms has gone beyond the dam in the northern part of the state. Downstream, rivers are running high and levees have been breaching.

Some are calling this a wake-up call for California as climate change could bring similar damage.

In the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, about 60 feet of levee is just gone, having been eaten away. A huge crane is dumping rocks in that gash to try and stop the river from breaking through.

Steve Mello, a farmer on Tyler Island in the delta, about two hours from San Francisco, watches every rock load, anxiously gnawing on his cigar.

"Every hour we work, we're safer," he says. "We're not out of the woods yet by a long shot."

The farms and homes nearby would be underwater without this levee. Mello watched it crumble in only 15 minutes.

The winter storms have stressed thousands of miles of rivers and levees. At one moment, the crew suddenly stops working and runs to check out another problem.

But this shouldn't be a surprise, says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University.

"It's actually exactly what has been predicted by scientists for at least 30 years," he says.

He says California is likely to see more extreme flooding with climate change. And the reason is pretty simple. If it's warmer, storms produce more rain instead of snow.

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