Torrential downpours after a week of mostly steady rainfall brought flash flooding to New York City on Friday, disrupting subway service, inundating ground-level apartments and turning some streets into small lakes.

Almost 20 cm of rain fell in some parts of the most populous city in the U.S., enough to enable a sea lion at Central Park Zoo to swim briefly out of the confines of her pool enclosure, Reuters reported. Another few inches could fall in the region before the storm system pushed out to sea later on Friday, forecasters said.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul warned of “life-threatening” floods and declared a state of emergency for New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley. Some National Guard troops were deployed to assist in the response.

In Mamaroneck, a Westchester County suburb north of the city, emergency officials used inflatable rafts to rescue people trapped in buildings by floods.

Flooding caused major disruptions to New York’s subway system and the Metro North commuter rail service, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Agency, which operates both. Some subway lines were suspended entirely, and many stations were closed. Some bus routes slowed to a crawl, trapping riders for hours. Officials warned some New Yorkers to avoid traveling unless they were fleeing a flooded area.

Systems producing intense rainfalls such as Friday’s have become more common in many parts of the U.S., including the New York City area.

Global warming has produced more extreme weather patterns in much of the world, according to climate scientists.

The complete phasing-out of fossil fuels is not realistic, China’s top climate official said, adding that these climate-warming fuels must continue to play a vital role in maintaining global energy security.

China is the world’s biggest consumer of fossil fuels including coal and oil, and its special climate envoy Xie Zhenhua was responding to comments by ambassadors at a forum in Beijing on Thursday ahead of the COP28 climate meeting in Dubai in November. Reuters said it obtained a copy of text of Xie’s speech, and a video recording of the meeting,

Countries are under pressure to make more ambitious pledges to tackle global warming after a U.N.-led global “stocktake” said 20 gigatons of additional carbon dioxide reductions would be needed this decade alone to keep temperatures from exceeding the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The stocktake will be at the centre of discussions at the COP28 climate meeting, with campaigners hoping it will create the political will to set clear targets to end coal and oil use.

Xie, however, said the intermittent nature of renewable energy and the immaturity of key technologies like energy storage means the world must continue to rely on fossil fuels to safeguard economic growth.

“It is unrealistic to completely phase out fossil fuel energy,” said Xie, who will represent China at COP28 this year.

At climate talks in Glasgow in 2021, China led efforts to change the language of the final agreement from “phasing out” to “phasing down” fossil fuels. China also supports a bigger role for abatement technologies like carbon capture and storage.

While ending fossil fuel use would not be on the table at COP28, Xie said China was open to setting a global renewable energy target as long as it took the divergent economic conditions of different countries into account.

He also said he welcomed pledges made to him by his U.S. counterpart John Kerry that a $100 billion annual fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change would soon be made available, adding it was “only a drop in the bucket”.

China and the United States, the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, resumed top-level cliamte talks in July after a hiatus brought about by U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the self-governing island of Taiwan, which China claims.

China has rejected U.S. attempts to treat climate change as a diplomatic “oasis” that can be separated from the broader geopolitical tensions between the two sides, with U.S. trade sanctions on Chinese solar panels still a sore point.

Xie said protectionism could drive up the price of solar panels by 20-25% and hold back the energy transition, and called on countries not to “politicise” cooperation in new energy.

He also reiterated China’s opposition to the E.U. Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which will impose carbon tariffs on imports from China and elsewhere.

Lee made landfall as a post-tropical cyclone packing hurricane-force winds in a far western part of Canada’s Nova Scotia province on Saturday, flooding roads, downing trees and cutting out power for tens of thousands of people along the North Atlantic coast.

At least one storm-related fatality was recorded on Saturday. A motorist in the U.S. state of Maine died after a tree fell on his vehicle, local media reported.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in its latest advisory that Lee was moving north after it made landfall on Long Island, a small island southwest of Halifax, on Saturday. The still-powerful weather system packed maximum sustained winds of 65 mph (100 km/h) with higher gusts, forecasters said.

Lee, now located about 60 km east-southeast of Eastport, Maine and about 215 west of Halifax, is expected to weaken steadily during the next couple of days.

It brought strong winds, coastal flooding and heavy rains to parts of coastal Maine and Atlantic Canada.

In the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, around 120,000 people were without power on Saturday as winds knocked down trees and felled power lines. In neighboring New Brunswick, nearly 20,000 people experienced power outages.

“Crews have been able to restore power to some customers … However, conditions are getting worse. In many cases, especially when winds are above 80 km/h, it isn’t safe for our crews,” Matt Drover of the Nova Scotia electric utility said earlier on Saturday.

Winds have reached over 100 km/h in parts of the west and over 90 km/h in downtown Halifax, the largest city in Nova Scotia, he said in a statement. Halifax airport was closed to all flights, Reuters reported.

In Maine, nearly 70,000 customers were out of power as of late Saturday, according to website PowerOutages.us.

Fierce waves lashing Nova Scotia’s shoreline littered flooded coastal roads with debris in some localities.

“The intensity of the storm is strong,” said Paul Mason, the executive director of the Nova Scotia Emergency Management Office. “Storm surge is expected to be the most intense in the afternoon into the early evening.”

The storm may bring an additional 20 to 50 millimeters of rain in parts of eastern Maine and New Brunswick in Canada, the NHC said, highlighting the risk of flooding in these areas.

“Lee will continue to impact the region tonight with rain or showers, strong winds, and high waves along the Atlantic coast,” the Canadian Hurricane Centre said in a statement.

In anticipation of the storm’s impact, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration issued an emergency declaration for Maine and Massachusetts, providing federal assistance for the states.

Lee has been churning as a large hurricane over the Atlantic for more than a week, briefly threatening Bermuda but mostly harmless for anyone on land. It marks the second year in a row that such a powerful storm has reached Canada after Hurricane Fiona ripped into eastern Canada a year ago.