Simple: this is exactly what you would expect on a high plateau. Think about it in terms of climbing a mountain with a fairly flat top. For a long time you're moving continuously up-slope, then when you get to the plateau you wander around randomly and frequently find outcroppings that are higher than anything you've encountered before. That doesn't mean you're still climbing, and if we were still climbing at the rate seen from 1980-2000 the "global mean temperature" (which is a thermodynamically meaningless arithmetic average) would be even higher than what we see today.
People who continually beat on extrema (like Denialists who claim that cold weather on the East Coast last winter is somehow proof that AGW isn't happening) are adding noise to the argument, not signal. The physically meaningful number is the heat content of the Earth/ocean system, and there's quite a bit of evidence it is rising, and that a significant portion of that rise is due to human activity.
This makes me think of when financial journalists/broadcasters constantly report that the SPX or the DJIA or the FTSE or whatever are hitting 'all time highs' and it's a really useless piece of information. Investors want to know how much it went up by on the day (and what he trend of the last few days/months has been), the fact that it poked through to a new high level is not important.
