New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo asserted that several forms of severe weather had never appeared in New York before climate change.
Cuomo appeared on MSNBC on Friday to discuss the damage from a Halloween storm that downed trees and power lines in part of the state. The storm triggered tornado warnings along with a chunk of the East Coast and killed at least one man in New York.
“Anyone who questions extreme weather and climate change is just delusional at this point. We have seen, in the state of New York, what everyone has seen. We’ve seen these weather patterns that we never had before,” Cuomo said.
“We didn’t have hurricanes, we didn’t have superstorms, we didn’t have tornadoes. This is a storm that came up just overnight, dropped about 5 inches of rain, and it was, literally, a matter of life and death for people,” he continued.
The governor relayed the story of one rescue he witnessed in which emergency officials saved a family of five, including an infant, from a flooded a home.
“It was a very dangerous and very precarious situation,” Cuomo said. “This is a recurring pattern, and anyone who is still in denial is making a very serious mistake.”
[Also read: ‘Climate change is happening’: The storm chaser who defends science in the White House]
New York has a long history of hurricanes hitting the state, including in 1821, when a major hurricane slammed Manhattan. Another pummeled the state in 1893 when the Category 2 storm made landfall on what is now JFK airport.
