Is this causation or just correlation?

Any claim of the form "X leads to Y" that someone wants to act on.

Examine the causal claim below.

1. State precisely what is being claimed to cause what, and over what time frame.
2. What kind of evidence supports it: experiment, natural experiment, longitudinal observation, or cross-sectional correlation? Say which, and what that design can and cannot establish.
3. Work through the alternatives explicitly: reverse causation, a common cause driving both, selection effects in who ends up measured, survivorship in whose data we see, and plain coincidence given how many relationships were tested.
4. Is there a plausible mechanism? Describe it, or say that none is offered.
5. Verdict: causal, plausibly causal, correlation only, or unclear. Then tell me the one study design that would settle it.

The claim:

Testing a claim. Statistics, causal stories, methodology, and tracing a repeated claim back to where it started.