The 2010s didn't show there was no counter-argument to begin with re: the hiatus/pause. What actually happened is that climatologists rewrote the temperature data of that period to simply remove the pause from history. In other words, having spent >10 years publishing scientific papers and studies on the causes of the pause in warming, they one day just announced that it'd never happened at all, that all that research had been on bad data and they'd "found" warming.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700

Of course trust falls when that happens. It's correct for trust to fall. They'd been making hyper-confident assertions about the future of climate and temperature for many people's entire lives and then one day, whoops, actually, it's "we've not been measuring temperature right for the entire history of our field and it fundamentally changes the entire shape of the data".