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Well, this one's just not true; e.g. 2021 was cooler than 2020. Even x to x+10 failed for 1998 vs 2008. I'm not sure if we'll ever see a decadal drop again without some major change, but the trend is still only something like 0.025C/year, and year-to-year variation of ~0.1C still regularly swamps that.
Remove "popularised" and this one's true. But the way we (well, the news media and the most salacious academics) popularize a model is to take whatever the most extreme possibility is at one p<0.01 end of the predictions, turn that into a "it will never snow in Britain again!!" headline, and so convert tomorrow's credibility into today's paycheck. Current measured warming since 1990 is pretty much right on the "Business-as-Usual"+"Best Estimate" line from the 1990 IPCC report, which puts it way above the "weather just changes, it'll probably revert to the mean again" null hypothesis, but "we're up nearly 1C and it's still accelerating" feels anticlimactic to people who vaguely think they remember that coastal cities were supposed to be flooding or something by now.
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