Read this from the Science Media Centre.
...the slowdown has risked becoming the bête noire of climate science. It has been unfairly framed as (another) nail in the coffin for global warming – ‘You said it would get warmer and it hasn’t!’ – as though the failure of the temperature record to conform each year blows the whole evidence base out of the water. Triumphant claims are made – erroneously – that the failure to warm has finally been revealed and that scientists (part of the conspiracy, naturally) have been keeping quiet about it.
"..conform each year"?! "Conform at any point since the turn of the millennium" is the criticism.