You might think I'm 7 or so years to late with this story... but apparently not.   Turns out that NASA who has been the primary repository for US and world temperature data was recently informed that they were operating for the past seven years with an undiscovered Y2K bug that corrupted the official average temperature calculations.

These folks who are at the center of the Global Warming debate don't let anyone know how they compute the average temperatures - but someone noticing a big jump at the turn of the century managed to reverse engineer and prove a bug in their code.  Turns out the warmest year on record wasn't 1998 followed closely by 2006 - but rather 1934 followed by 1998...

In fact now that they've "corrected" their calculations it turns out that like 5 of the top 10 warmest years on record are from prior to WWII.... hmm - can we get a code review here?  You'd think an organization like NASA would be open to a code review...

Here are the updated stats: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

And someone who seems a bit more peeved at the whole thing - http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/08/official-us-cli.html

(Personally I just think it shows what idiots the team at NASA is for not having their code reviewed - even now - could we get that organization to implement some sound engineering principals!)