The liberals are doing the same for cost of living, unemployment, poverty, marriage/divorce, abortion, ACT - any record they need to rig for their propaganda.
I’m not accusing CRU of being liberal, having an agenda, or anything at all, donna. I don’t know, and it really doesn’t matter to the science loss. They may simply have not been thinking about future possibilities when they discarded the raw data, among them that the data would be adjusted over and over. By now, though, it is clear that is a disaster.
I won’t even accuse them of being inept scientists. Unquestionably, there was a heckuva lot of data, and keeping every iteration of data and every record of the way adjustments were made is certainly daunting. They may well have believed that they didn’t have the ability to keep all those records, and believed no one would ever look at them if they were kept.
The worst thing I am willing to say about them at this time is that they should have been transparent all along, and let people know what they were doing. If others disagreed with their judgment, they could propose alternatives. Now, though, it is clear that their judgment proved not to be adequate, and much that might have been saved had this been known a decade ago is probably irretrievable.
It is never a good idea to have all your eggs in one basket... a complaint that I have had many times over the years when I’ve seen “cost cutting consolidation” in many arenas.