"Carl Wunsch on Self-Deception"

Another thought-provoking post on Climate Audit is here (check out the comment section too).

From the abstract of the linked paper:

The human eye and brain are powerful pattern detection instruments. Coupled with the clear human need to perceive the world as deterministic and understandable, and the often counter-intuitive results of probability theory, it is easy to go astray in making inferences. In particular, many examples exist where attention was called to apparent extreme behavior, whether in time or space series, or in the appearance of unusual patterns, that are just happenstance.

Wunsch's paper applies to the catastrophic global warming hysteria as well as to the ivory-bill hysteria.

In the former, some people think they see an "unprecedented" catastrophic global warming signal in temperature and weather data that are actually quite routine. In the latter, some people think they see evidence of living Ivory-billed Woodpeckers in the form of "unusual patterns" of toots, taps, glimpses etc that are also quite routine.