North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) on Sunday tried to imply that he had been taken out of context when he said that climate change was in “God’s hands.”

In the wake of a devastating winter storm that left over a dozen people dead and about a million people with out power through out the South, the North Carolina governor told CBS host Bob Schieffer that his state was finally starting to recover.

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“We’ve never seen storms go in such a massive widespread area in the state,” McCroy explained “Two times in two weeks. And it’s about depleted our budget. And it’s also going to have an impact on our economy here in North Carolina because people were stuck inside and not spending money. And also, sadly, we had at least six fatalities.”

Schieffer reminded McCrory of a 2008 radio interview with WHKY when he had said that he wasn’t convinced that global warming was real, and that it was caused by “God’s hands.”

“I, frankly, think there are some things that are out of our control,” McCrory told the station. “It’s in God’s hands. Frankly, the world has been warming for a long time, and back in the 70s, if you look a the covers of Newsweek and Time, we were getting cold.”

“After going through this thing, do you still feel that way?” Schieffer asked McCrory during the Sunday interview. “And is there something we ought to be doing about it in the meantime?”

“I think someone chopped off the total sentence there,” McCrory insisted. “But I will say this, that I feel that there has always been climate change. The debate is really how much is really man made, and how much will it cost to have any impact on climate change.”

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“My main argument is, let’s clean up the environment,” he added. “And as a mayor and now as a governor, I’m spending my time cleaning our air, cleaning our water, and cleaning the ground. And I think that’s where the argument should be on both the left and the right. And if that has an impact on climate change, good.”

Watch this video from CBS’ Face The Nation, broadcast Feb. 16, 2014.