What to do when someone says that Earth's warming is caused by the sun

The initial article is a translation (by Google Gemini and ChatGPT 4) of a report that appeared on Italian site Il Sussidiario in January 2023, which covers an interview with Valentina Zharkova published in the newspaper La Verità. Zharkova, a professor of mathematics at Northumbria University in England, is famous for having co-authored a paper called "Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale," which claims the Sun causes global warming, not greenhouse gas emissions.

The paper was published by Nature's Scientific Reports on 24 June 2019 and retracted on 3 March 2020. A very long peer review thread on PubPeer has led to the retraction and is an absolutely unmissable and wildly enjoyable read.

I was not able to directly access the interview in La Verità, a newspaper known for a strong climate-change bias. However, the secondary report is perhaps even more interesting, as it would offer the journalist an even greater opportunity to provide context to the readers. The Trust Project categorizes an interview as an opinion piece in its Trust Indicators, specifically the Type of Work Labels one. An interview is expected to provide a perspective and not be fully fact-checked, and hopefully, it is fully transparent to the user that it falls within the realm of opinion pieces. From a news piece about the interview, however, we should fully expect fact-based journalism. Alas, the opportunity to provide context was not taken by Il Sussidiario. I am not sure whether the inherited bias in this secondary report is circumstantial or an editorial decision. If I had to guess, I would say it is circumstantial.

The 'rewrites' use the initial article as a starting point and add a modular information needs approach. In this particular case, taking into account that it is essentially an opinion piece with little context and no attempt at fact-checking the scientist's statements, a full rewrite was necessary to make it fit for purpose.

The modular article was not written with the intent to inform on the topic, but purely as an example of methodology in modular journalism. The example is also purposefully 19 months old so as not to risk being injected into any ongoing political discourse about climate.

That said, it would be interesting to compare the user effects triggered in the piece with those from a similar report, for example, this one by Breitbart titled: 'Winter is coming' warns the solar physicist the alarmists tried to silence, again featuring Zharkova.