Those sheltered few who still believe man has no impact on the climate have had one of their central arguments debased.

Yes, the Earth has not been warming too much in recent years, and yes, the Earth’s surface warmed less rapidly since the turn of the millennium than climate models predicted.

But – it appears that the gap between the calculated and measured warming is not due to systematic errors of the models, as many sceptics suspect.

New studies show the discord is due to constant, random fluctuations in the climate.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the University of Leeds have demonstrated this with a comprehensive statistical analysis.

The study clearly showed that the relevant models do not tend to overestimate man-made climate change.

So the good models stand, and global warming remains highly likely to reach critical proportions by the end of the century, if nothing is done.

The climate often drifts on the winds of chance, chaos, and a staggering array of conflating influences, making the job of even broad forecasting difficult.

Critics often use the difference between predictions and later measurements to degrade the authority of the models, so researchers Jochem Marotzke and Piers M. Forster sought to put them to the test.

They focused on the fact that the temperature of the Earth's surface has increased by just 0.06 degrees Celsius - considerably less than was predicted by the 114 model simulations that are compiled in climate reports by the IPCC.

The pair’s new work explains the warming pause as the result of random fluctuations in the chaotic processes of the climate system.

Their study is published in the journal Nature. 

Most importantly for the researchers and their international colleagues: they found no evidence of conceptual errors in the models.

Notably, the advanced models did not appear to react too sensitively to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

“The claim that climate models systematically overestimate global warming caused by rising greenhouse gas concentrations is wrong,” says Marotzke.

“On the whole, the simulated trends agree with the observations.”

Until now, many climatologists assumed that their modelling simulated different temperature rises due to their different degrees of sensitivity to changes in solar energy in the atmosphere.

The researchers say climatologists will greet this finding with relief, tinged perhaps with disappointment.

The large-scale model review found that it is not possible to make predictions more accurate by tweaking the model - randomness does not respond to tweaking.

“If excessive sensitivity of the models caused the models to calculate too great a temperature trend over the past 15 years, the models that assume a high sensitivity would calculate a greater temperature trend than the others,” Forster explained.

But this is not the case, even for those models that are based on a degree of sensitivity up to three times greater than others.

“The difference in sensitivity explains nothing really,” Marotzke said.

“I only believed that after I had very carefully scrutinised the data on which our graphs are based.”

What the models do show, for all their idiosyncratic results, is that if mankind continues as before, the Earth will continue to warm up – leading to level of variability, extremes and consequences that are even harder to predict than the circumstances that create them.