False Cause Fallacy

Definition:

Presuming that a real or perceived relationship between things means that one is the cause of the other.

Scenario

Pointing to a fancy chart, Roger shows how temperatures have been rising over the past few centuries, whilst at the same time the numbers of pirates have been decreasing; thus, pirates cool the world and global warming is a hoax.

Redressing the Fallacy

If your interlocutor says something like “B always occurs when A occurs, so A must cause B,” ask them how they know that B doesn’t cause A. Again, just because two things are correlated, it does not mean there is a causal relationship between them. It often helps to come up with an absurd example that clearly shows the disconnect between correlation and causation. The Spurious Correlations project by Tyler Vigen has many absurd examples of correlations.