Extending the logic, particularly to the highlighted portion of your post, necessitates that a cooling cycle was interrupted/stopped in which a warming cycle had begun.
At what point do we recognize that the dual cycles exist?
We recognize that cycles exist when the proper analysis shows that they exist. There are plenty of climatologists out there who have studied cycles and pseudo-cyclic behaviour in the climate system. They use tools like Fourier Analysis.
What they don't do is eyeball a chart. There's no evidence that something has happened since 1998 to change the system CM. That's the point.
Evidence. Real evidence produced by analytical tools.
So everyone is probably familiar with standard deviation here? At least I hope...so there's a trend, and the points above and below an extrapolated trend-line will have a standard deviation. So that means there are predicted values in the future, but they are subject to the variation or noise that exists with the trend. The standard error of the estimate in this case is what that is called. I don't have Minitab or STATA on my home computer, but I could show it very clearly with my work computer, the temperature that has followed since 1998 fits within the standard error of the estimate when the trend pre-1999 is extended out until now. Even with all the statistical noise from year to year with ENSO/Solar cycles/aerosol loading, etc...there is no evidence that the trend has changed.
And most of all...all of this type of analysis should be done on
all of the global surface temperature products, not on an average of them all. HadCRUT and GISS don't sample the polar regions in the same manner. The satellites aren't even measuring surface temperature.