Temperatures is a project mainly written in ..., it's free.
A temperature script for pulling daily data
Simple python script to download temperatures from global temperature database on a per city basis, taking the year to start from (inclusive).
Not for commercial use.
Uses ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/ish-history.txt
Used in following way
python TempExp.py "DUBLIN" 2007
then follow the instructions.
More likely that the request times out the further back in time one goes and the bigger the city (more temperature data sources = more requests).