Last week, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies – one of four agencies responsible for monitoring the global temperatures used by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – released its statistics for October. According to the GISS figures, last month was the warmest October on record around the world.

This struck some observers as odd. There had been no reports of autumn heat waves in the international press and there is almost always blanket coverage of any unusually warm weather since it fits into the widespread media bias that climate catastrophe lies just ahead. In fact, quite the opposite had occurred; there had been plenty of stories about unseasonably cool weather.

London had experienced its first October snow in 70 years. Chicago and the Great Plains states had broken several lowest-temperature records, some of which had stood for 120 years. Tibet had broken snowfall records. Glaciers in Alaska, the Alps and New Zealand had begun advancing. Sea ice expanded so rapidly it covered 30% more of Arctic than at the end of October 2007. (Of course, you saw few stories about that, too, since interest in the Arctic ice cover is reserved only for when its melting reinforces hysteria over global warming and polar bear extinction).

So the GISS claim that October was the warmest ever seemed counterintuitive, to say the least.

Thanks, though, to Steve McIntyre, the Toronto computer analyst who maintains the blog climateaudit.org, and Anthony Watts, the American meteorologist who runs wattsupwiththat.com, we did not have to wait long to find out the cause of the GISS’s startling statistics: Data-entry error.