In response to the extreme flooding in parts of New York state on Friday, Cuomo remarked, “Anyone who questions extreme 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 see these weather patterns that we never had before. We didn’t have hurricanes, we didn’t have superstorms, we didn’t have tornadoes,” the governor claimed. “This is a storm that came up just overnight, dropped about five inches of rain, and it was literally a matter of life or death for people.”

“I was at one of the sites this morning, a river overcame its banks with five inches of water, ran through a residential neighbourhood. The streets looked like rivers themselves, people were trapped in their homes. The one home you’re mentioning was people were afraid the house itself was gonna be swept away,” Cuomo explained. “Luckily we train with the swift water rescue teams, and they literally took five people out of the home, including an infant, but it was a very dangerous and very precarious situation. Thank God we have the best first responders, I believe, in the United States, and everyone got off safely.”

“But this is a recurring pattern, and anyone who is still in denial is making a very serious mistake,” he concluded.