A leading climate change expert has warned that there needs to be a significant injection of funding into research on global warming given the dire implications for mankind should it continue unchecked.

Speaking at an event organised by the Willis Research Network, Dr Matt Huddleston, Principal Consultant – impacts of climate change on business, at the Met Office warned the world needed to adequately resource the efforts to identify mankind’s part in the rise of world temperatures.

“We know more about climate change then we do about gravity,” he told delegates. “Gravity is fixed but we know little about how it functions. Therefore there are considerable resources expended on research and I have been at the CERN facility in Switzerland where they are looking at greater research.

“But such a level of resource is not being focused on climate change yet it is a far more fundamental threat to our survival. The world is heating up. There is no doubt it will continue but it is our future participation on this planet which is in doubt.”

He cited the Pakistan floods and the recent heat wave in Moscow as clear indications of extreme weather patterns explaining that when the mean temperature rises extremes increase exponentially.

“The Pakistan floods were caused by a single pattern of weather not centuries of historical data,” added Dr Huddleston. It is these individual events which will hit us hardest and are the most difficult to understand and accurately predict.”

He added that all the climatic indicators pointed to an above active hurricane season and that the data gathered by the Met Office showed clearly the world was getting warmer.

“This is constant pattern from multiple sources,” added Dr Huddleston.

He said a four degree rise in the world temperature could well see a one in a 200 year typhoon loss which would deliver in excess of a billion dollars of insured damages should it hit China and in the United Kingdom such a temperature rise would have significant effect.

It would see a 30% in one in 100 year flood events and a natural climate shift of the UK storm tracks south wards would result in average insured losses in the UK increasing by 25% as the storms moved south to target densely populated area such as the South East and London.