This is Scientific Americans' 60-Second Science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

Climate change.

It's the culprit behind an increase in droughts and floods, wildfires and storms.

And a new study shows that it's making more mere cats come down with tuberculosis.

The findings appear in the journal, Nature Climate Change.

The tuberculosis is an endemic disease in mere cats.

It has been present in the population since the mere cats have been studied.

Maria Panif is a researcher at the Doniana Biological Research Station in Spain.

She says that for mere cats living in the Kalahari, TB outbreaks have been on the rise.

Going to deadly, so have the local temperatures.

So we wanted to know whether there was a link between climate change, which has been

increasing temperature extremes and increases in tuberculosis outbreaks.

And how this may affect population of these social species.

So Panif and her colleagues crunched the numbers.

I was very fortunate to collaborate with the Kalahari Mirkett Project, which is a fantastic

project where we now have over 22 years of very detailed data on individual

mere cats, and about their survival, their reproduction, their growth, their movement

and so on.

So it's a very rich data set of workers.

They use the data to build models to predict how climate change will affect mere cat populations.

Our main results show that climate change affects mere cats primarily by increasing

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