Study: Global warming worst in Western Europe

Global warming and a hotter solar cycle will bump up average atmospheric temperatures about a third of a degree by 2014, and then flatten out for the rest of the decade, suggest climate scientists.
Temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere, "especially Western Europe, will experience the largest warming," almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit, says the study in the current Geophysical Research Letters led by Judith Lean of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington D.C.
In the study, the scientists match recent surface temperature observations with past ones to project a temperature increase "at a rate 50% greater than predicted," by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
An uptick already underway in the sun's solar cycle combined with greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere, will trigger the increase by 2014, find the researchers. However, declining solar activity after 2014 will keep temperatures steady until 2019.
A major volcanic eruption would cool temperatures or severe El Nino would exacerbate them, the study cautions. "The major assumption associated with our forecasts is that ‘past is prologue’; climate will continue to respond in the future to the same factors that have influenced it in the recent past and the response will continue to be linear over the next several decades," concludes the study.