Back in October 2005, after our regular update of the GISTEMP temperature data, the WaPo did a story (front page) on how this meant that 2005 was likely to be a record warm year. The political appointees at NASA HQ freaked out, literally screaming down the phone insisting that this was unauthorized…

And that we had to pull the data from the website immediately. We complied while making our objections strongly felt (and reaching out to science leadership to get this reversed). The data went back up a day later of course (unchanged) and 2005 was indeed the warmest year to that point.