Climate change will speed up and could lead to unprecedented change in weather systems over the coming years, a top scientist was warning today.

Professor Mike Hulme, a senior climate change scientist, will tell an international conference at the University of East Anglia in Norwich that it was a major challenge.

He will say the environment had changed significantly throughout history and global climate change posed a different type of threat, with the rate of warming already exceeding anything experienced in the last 100,000 years.

The question was whether mankind could survive this dramatically changing climate and whether the Earth's ecosystems were resilient enough to survive.