evidence: As the MDV was overlooked, its contribution to global warming is wrongly attributed to the secular trend, resulting in an overestimate of anthropogenic warming rate in the second half of the twentieth century, which can lead to poor capability of climate models to predict the recent hiatus (Scafetta 2010, 2012, 2013). However, the MDV has contributed to the evolution of GMST considerably, accounting for 40% of the warming over the last half century (Tung and Zhou 2013) or 60% since 1970 (Scafetta 2010), and the warming and cooling decades were the visible manifestation of different phases of MDV. So, its significance needs to be reflected in the definition of warming hiatus. Tung et al. (2014) described warming hiatus as a recurrent pause in the global warming rate. This motivated us to develop a method to define the global warming hiatus based on the rate of temperate change. According to the phases of MDV extracted from the ensemble GMST time series by local and adaptive ensemble empirical-mode decomposition (EEMD) method, a quantitative definition of warming hiatus is introduced. Section 2 describes the data and method used in this study. Section 3 elaborates the quantitative definition of warming hiatus and other three critical episodes in GMST multidecadal evolution. Section 4 shows 50-yr statistical predictions of MDV and secular trend. Summary and discussion are given in section 5.