Try telling this to climate change activists

There's a gradual process to go from hypothesis to theory to fact, and to get there, you need several types of independent evidence. Correlational evidence is okay as one of those.

A correct statement is that correlation is not proof of causation (no matter how strong).

Types of evidence:

* Correlation

* Theoretical basis / strong hypothesis

* Extrapolation

* Interpolation

* Small-scale well-controlled experiments (lab setting)

* Large-scale less controlled experiments (real-world setting)

* Anecdotes

* ... and so on

You want several of those before you start to believe anything, and some are stronger than others. Correlation isn't fundamentally weaker than most of those, though; all of those carry their own methodological issues. The number of times you can have a large-scale perfectly-controlled preregistered randomized control trial with no confounding effects is exceptionally rare (some medical trials, and a few other settings).

There are several algorithms that calculate the causal structure from correlations: PC, GES, FGS, FCI

They are proven to be asymptotically correct