(iStock)

Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham argued at CPAC Friday that global warming wasn't man-made because the number of pirates in the world have increased along with global temperatures.



"Correlation isn't causation," Cunningham told an audience assembled for a CPAC panel denying the existence of climate change. "Should we kill all the pirates then?"



Cunningham then put up a chart showing the number of pirates vs. global average temperatures—a chart originally created by the parody religion of Pastafarianism, which worships a deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and satirizes the teaching of creationism in schools.



Cunningham was joined on the panel by Harold Doiron, who is part of a group of retired NASA scientists and engineers who believe there is no "convincing physical evidence" of man-made climate change and call themselves "The Right Climate Stuff Research Team."



Doiron said anyone who could "read a graph" could see that global temperatures were stable over time.