This. Environmental is everything with tape. If you don't know your temps (operational, transport, storage), RH and particulate counts then you probably shouldn't be using tape at all.

Understanding why this is as important as it is requires some visualization of the bit densities of modern tape drives, the capacity is enormous, the tape is ridiculously thin and the bits are small enough that it doesn't take much to make a part of a tape unreadable beyond what the error recovery logic can deal with. And that's before we get into longer term effects such as layer-to-layer copy and demagnetization.