Source here. (click on image to enlarge)
This chart represents the 15 years (180 months), starting February 1, 1997 and ending January 31, 2011. Per the NOAA/NCDC U.S. temperature data records, the 12-month period ending January 2011 was the 5th coldest January-ending period for the last 15 years. (In terms of a single month, January 2011 was 37th coldest January in the past 117 years.)
The per century cooling trend of this period, a minus 1.3°F, took place in spite of the huge warmth produced by two large El Niño events during this 15-year span: 1997-1998 and 2009-2010.
At some point, U.S. continental warming will resume, but the extended decade-long plus global cooling trend persists, contradicting the experts. None of the IPCC climate models, nor "consensus" experts predicted this cooling trend for the continental U.S.
With the continental U.S. having the most extensive thermometer network in the world, this suggests that possibly other areas of the world would be reporting a cooling trend if they also had the extent and quality of actual temperature measuring coverage that exists in the U.S.
As a reminder, the climate alarmist AGW hypothesis calls for total global warming, which is not happening across the large U.S. landmass. Obviously, the case for the AGW hypothesis (human-CO2 emissions inducing catastrophic warming) is significantly weakened by this real-world NOAA empirical evidence.
Note: A temperature trend, as shown in the above chart, is not a prediction.
Update 2/9/11: See U.S. winter tempertures decline dangerously at -31.2 degrees per century rate since 1998.