Wow! I found this part the most hilarious: "To calculate information about the influence of one weather station on another ... the code draws little coloured circles (actually little 32-sided polygons) on a virtual white screen and then goes looking for non-white pixels to identify areas for which data is missing."
Scientific applications are usually written by scientists who are usually not professional programmers. Telling them to hire a professional programmer is like telling a struggling single mother to hire a nanny. It would obviously help, but the money's not there.
If their basic data manipulation utilities are written like this, one wonders how the source of their climate modeling software looks...
Why assume climate modelers are special? Most scientific code is going to be like this.
Incidentally, in case anyone did not get the reference, the title comes from a song called "99 Red Balloons" which is a brief chronicle of military awareness computers detecting a group of red balloons as an incoming threat which leads to a war.
I think it's very clever: they cover up their manipulation of data as bugs. They might even get away with it.