Self-deception has been a topic of late, here and many other places, recently discussed here in Political Failure, which pulled quotes from a Cowen paper, Self-Deception as the Root of Political Failure.

By self-deception I mean individual behavior that disregards, throws out, or reinterprets freely available information. Individuals frequently treat their personal values as a kind of ideal point, and assume that the pursuit of those values also yield the best practical outcome.

Discussions elsewhere have parsed this a bit finer, making a distinction between non-scholars (i.e. stupid people), who simply avoid knowing anything of subjects about which they nonetheless have opinions, and scholars, who carefully select dollops of information that support their views and ignore contrary information. I suspect that we stupid people do some of each, and that scholars do so as well.

For example, consider this:

On RealClimate, Michael Mann has a good explanation of what is going on with North America’s unusual winter weather. He discusses what parts of the weather may be due to ENSO fluctuations and what part could be a signal of climate change.

Indeed, though the current pattern of winter U.S. warmth looks much more like the pattern predicted by climate models as a response to anthropogenic forcing (see Figure below left) than the typical ‘El Nino’ pattern, neither can one attribute this warmth to anthropogenic forcing. As we are fond of reminding our readers, one cannot attribute a specific meteorological event, an anomalous season, or even (as seems may be the case here, depending on the next 2 months) two anomalous seasons in a row, to climate change. Moreover, not even the most extreme scenario for the next century predicts temperature changes over North America as large as the anomalies witnessed this past month. But one can argue that the pattern of anomalous winter warmth seen last year, and so far this year, is in the direction of what the models predict.

This is Gary Peterson and Michael Mann, card carrying dark siders more interested in power than truth, so it's no surprise that the explanation, though full of caveats, ignores other likely explanations.

Western U.S. wildfires are likely to increase in the coming decades, according to a new tree-ring study led by the University of Comahue in Argentina and involving the University of Colorado at Boulder that links episodic fire outbreaks in the past five centuries with periods of warming sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. . .

While previous tree-ring studies have linked fires in different regions of western North America to drought associated with the warm El Niño phase or cool La Niña phase of the Southern El-Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon in the Pacific, the new study is the first to correlate the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation with increased North American fires on such a large scale, said the authors. The team analyzed nearly 34,000 individual fire scar dates from tree rings, primarily ponderosa pine and Douglas fir, at 241 sites -- the largest record of tree rings linked to past wildfires ever assembled.

"This trend of warmer sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic appears to be correlated with dry spells we have seen in the West since the late 1990s," said Veblen. "If the trend continues for the next 60 years or so as it has in the past, the degree of fire occurrence in the West could be unprecedented compared to anything in recent memory."

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is also a factor, as are cyclical changes in the jet stream. They all have different cycle lengths, often countering one another but sometimes amplifying extremes. But it's hard to score political points with an explanation like that. There are too many factors and all we have is correlation rather than causation to link any or all of them to observed events. We can say that there is a clear tendency for condition X when a certain oscillation is in a certain phase, but the net effects depend on many other things - some known, some suspected and some still mysterious.

I suspect that these dark siders have deceived themselves, as well as consciously seeking to deceive others for instrumental reasons. The compound effect of this layered deception reduces the value of their views. Unless you have the detailed knowledge to pick apart their politicized statements to find any small value that might be hidden, you would do well to reject it all and seek an honest broker of information.