Mildly Interesting

I agree it seems a strange choice of words.

Japanese monks and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years. ~~They accidentally~~ In doing so they built the world's longest climate dataset

Something like that seems more straightforward.

Mr Bob Ross would like a word...
I agree with you on inadvertently, but accident, if I'm not mistaken would generally considered something where you do not inherently attribute blame. At least thats what I recall being justification for making the change in UK in calling traffic 'incidents' incidents instead of accidents several years back. Dunno if it stuck though.

They accidentally became climate change wackos supporting a communist agenda to make everyone gay and push taxes supporting public transportation.

Hmm not necessarily, accidentally has no negative implication unlike accident usually has. In this particular case the meaning of accidentally is synonym with unexpectedly or by chance.

Accidents don’t have to be bad? Accident means just “not on purpose” it has no connotation either way

Aww, shit. Now there's record all over the floor... I'll go get the data bin...

Was going to say this myself and then saw your comment. Totally agree. 'Accidently' practically implies that the record keeping itself only happened because some pencils happened to fall on paper. They did exactly what they intended to and used it for their own purpose. It just turned out to have a different purpose, too.

Incidentally would be more accurate perhaps.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/date-of-the-peak-cherry-tree-blossom-in-kyoto.zip?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

It's not the longest climate dataset, but it may be the longest directly recorded by humans. All of these types of data are climate proxies (alternate indicators we can use to gain information about historic climates), the longest of which are ice core measurements.

You know, it's the weather. Temperature goes up. Temperature goes down. EZPZ