Back in August, Detroit received a lot of rain in one day – August 11, when 4.57 inches fell in a 24-hour period.

At the time, Salon.com assigned the event, and the associated flooding, to global warming.  However, the data certainly didn't appear to support this alarmist conclusion, as I wrote at the time:

Since records began for the city back in 1874, there are absolutely no hints of any significant trends in maximum daily precipitation or the number of days per year with greater than one or two inches of precipitation. So-called 'extreme' precipitation events of this nature are not becoming any more common or severe in Detroit over the past 140 years.

The same applies for just the month of August. No sign that extreme daily precipitation events are becoming more common or severe here, either.

The August 2014 event wasn't even a record.  The largest one-day precipitation for Detroit took place on July 31, 1925 – when 4.74 inches fell.  And the previous record for August was 4.51 inches back in 1926, an amount just barely below the 2014 event.  The next highest August one-day rain events were in 1888, 1956, 1974, and 1890, in that order.  Hardly a trend toward more extreme events in August.

The Detroit storm is back in the media.  Midwest Energy News has a story about how "'Resilient Michigan' preparing cities for climate change."  Resilient is another buzzword chosen to play into climate change fears, thereby allowing vast amounts of public money to be spent on infrastructure.

As the Energy News story states:

The Associated Press documented this issue in September, showing climate adaptation work being done throughout the country, including in Michigan, without calling it that. (One of the towns profiled was Grand Haven, which is working with Resilient Michigan.)

That may be starting to change, though, as communities live through extreme weather conditions like last year's severe flooding in southeast Michigan.

'Those climate impacts became real, very quickly,' [Resilient Michigan planner Harry] Burkholder said.

So "climate adaptation work [is] being done throughout the country, including in Michigan, without calling it that"?  How deceitful.

A clever two-pronged public relations effort appears to be underway: (1) assign or link events to climate change even if the science doesn't support the assignment, and (2) undertake climate change-related work without calling it that.  Some involved in this type of scheme may find that if the public figure out what is going on, they may not be too pleased.

The phrase "too clever by half" comes to mind.