There was no "hiatus" in global heating. Rather, denialists seized on the way science handles a minor anomaly in important data by proposing and testing various explanations for it.

We don't need to know exactly where the water rose over the seawall to recognize a flood. We shouldn't need to know every detail of how the temperature of the ecosphere is rising to recognize that it's going to swamp our world, nor that the only way to prevent that is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions a lot.