When someone is suggesting that a particular thing is causing or partly causing a particular outcome it is not a choose-your-own-correlate-adventure to look at

When someone is suggesting that a particular thing is causing or partly causing a particular outcome it is not a choose-your-own-correlate-adventure to look at how prevalence of that thing and that outcome have changed over time. Things tend to be affected by their causes (!) so when the outcome is changing significantly and the purported cause is not then it suggests more evidence needs to be offered before we accept that the purported cause actually has a significant affect.