evidence: Climate models can recreate the slowdown in global warming since 1998, as long as they correctly factor in crucial variables such as the state of the El Niño system, new research has shown. The discovery vindicates the models against the accusation that they failed to predict the "alleged hiatus" in surface warming, says CSIRO researcher James Risbey, who led the study. [...] Because Pacific temperature patterns flip back and forth every few decades, not all climate models reflect the real-world state of El Niño at a given time. That means that, when many models are averaged together, climate models have tended to overestimate the rate of post-1998 warming.