A headline on the Irish Independent website said “Climate crisis explainer: Why is July so cold while everywhere else on the planet is burning? Prof. Luke O'Neill says Ireland is suffering from asymptomatic global warming.”
No such headline appeared on the website.
Posts being shared online feature what appears to be a headline on the Irish Independent’s website saying: “Climate crisis explainer: Why is July so cold while everywhere else on the planet is burning? Prof. Luke O'Neill says Ireland is suffering from asymptomatic global warming.”
The part that says “asymptomatic global warming” has been underlined in red.
But the screenshot is not real. No part of that headline has appeared on the newspaper’s website.
The phrase “asymptomatic global warming” hasn’t appeared on the website either.
The person mentioned in the fake headline, Professor Luke O’Neill, is a real professor of biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin.
He has been quoted by the Irish Independent before, and written articles for the paper. He told Full Fact that he had recently been on the Irish radio station Newstalk talking about the health consequences of overheating, but hadn’t specifically discussed Ireland and had no idea what asymptomatic global warming is.
Full Fact has contacted the Irish Independent for comment.
We often see misinformation circulating online in the form of doctored screenshots supposedly showing media reports.
Recently we’ve fact checked Guardian opinion columns about Insulate Britain and reparations for slavery that were never published, an edited Metro front page that featured vaccine misinformation and a fake ITV news headline claiming vigorous duvet shaking caused heart attacks.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because no such headline appeared in the paper and the image has been faked.
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