On Friday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) said that hurricanes, superstorms, and tornadoes did not occur before climate change. In the same breath, he said that anyone who questions the left’s climate-alarmist hysteria is “just delusional.” He may want to check in a mirror.

After he finished berating President Donald Trump in an interview with MSNBC, Cuomo turned to his latest attempt to enforce climate change orthodoxy.

“You know, anyone who questions extreme weather and climate change is just delusional at this point,” Cuomo said. “We have seen in the State of New York what everyone is seeing. 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.”

While it is at least plausible that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels might lead to increasing global temperatures and rising sea levels, it takes a special kind of insanity to think that there were no hurricanes or tornadoes before human beings started burning carbon for energy.

Even interpreting Cuomo’s words charitably, the governor said that New York State did not experience hurricanes, superstorms, and tornadoes until the effects of manmade climate change. It is difficult to assess this claim, because written records do not go very far back, but even this less delusional suggestion is entirely incorrect.

An analysis of sedimentary evidence from New Jersey showed that a major hurricane struck the New York/New Jersey area between 1278 and 1438, long before the internal combustion engine. Another hurricane tracked parallel to the East Coast with impacts on New England and New York in August 1635. On September 8, 1667, a “severe storm” was reported in Manhattan. The Great Storm of 1693 caused severe damage on Land Island in October 1693. In September 1785, ships crashed into Governors Island as a result of powerful waves reportedly generated by a tropical cyclone. In August 1788, a hurricane struck New York City or Long Island, causing severe flooding and leaving the west side of the Battery “in ruins.”

Unless the Iroquois and their ancestors were secretly burning fossil fuels — and cleverly erased the evidence they did so — Cuomo’s statement about there having been no hurricanes and superstorms in New York prior to climate change is flat-out wrong. A simple Google search would have set him straight.

Furthermore, his remarks illustrate how climate alarmism can cloud someone’s judgment. It is flat-out ridiculous to suggest that extreme weather did not exist before human beings pumped carbon into the atmosphere. After all, Earth’s atmosphere has had far more carbon in the past than it does today.

While the climate change narrative may make logical sense, the data does not support the left’s alarmist position. Scientists and alarmists have predicted various kinds of doomsday scenarios — extreme cold, extreme heat, glaciers melting, cities underwater — none of which have come to pass. In one of the most embarrassing examples, alarmists predicted that The Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean would sink beneath the waves in 2018 — and the islands are still there. In fact, they have actually grown in recent years!

It is far from “delusional” to question the “climate change consensus.” Cuomo’s remarks were far more delusional.

H/T William Davis, the Daily Caller.

Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.