Data is, um, are, datum is, oh boy!

I think that the battle over keeping datum singular and data plural has been lost. However, many would disagree. This recent press release from the University of British Columbia wants data to be plural, but in this section... well, I'm not quite sure what is going on.

“Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year,” says Tim Vines, a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia. “Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and is thus irreplaceable, and many other datasets are expensive to regenerate.
“The current system of leaving data with authors means that almost all of it is lost over time, unavailable for validation of the original results or to use for entirely new purposes.”

I suspect that the quote from Vines started with data being singular - "Much of this data" etc - but that someone changed bits of it into the plural. How "Much of this data are" can be correct with "is irreplacable" escapes me. The second paragraph has a similar confusion.