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Normally, I'd agree with you. There seems to be more incompetence than malice, in general. With technology as it is and science as it is and has been for hun

Normally, I'd agree with you. There seems to be more incompetence than malice, in general. With technology as it is and science as it is and has been for hundreds of years, this seems like an extraordinary goof. I could see a goof being losing a block of data, but all of it? Why was destruction of this data even an option or consideration? How expensive and difficult is it to keep it? I suspect there are numerous other organizations that would store it if they were given copies of it. "Purposely" might be a bit extreme but it was more than a simple goof.

protomyth 17y ago
The thought that someone couldn't walk down to the local store and buy an external hard drive(s) to store this data is unlikely. Heck, a general call out to the community to find storage would work (ask google, they would do it and index it). No, I believe malice is really the only explanation. Raw data allows reproducibility and intelligent debate.
- Joeboy 17y ago
  The data in question dates from the 1980s. You couldn't "walk down to the local store and buy an external hard drive", and if you could a gigabyte of storage would cost you tens of thousands of pounds. Google didn't exist.
  - protomyth 17y ago
    The data dates from the 80's but it sounds like it was a recent decision to delete the data.
    - Joeboy 17y ago
      FTA: "Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s". What part of that makes it sound like this data was lost more recently than the 1980s?