Last week, on October 6th, The Guardian published a story under the headline "Sun's role in warming the planet may be overestimated, study finds.". A day later, tech website The Register published a climate story of its own, "Much of recent global warming actually caused by Sun," at a URL that ended "/solar_as_big_as_people/."

The two headlines are completely contradictory, yet bizarrely both stories report on the same Nature letter, a piece of research led by Professor Joanna Haigh at Imperial College London. So what on Earth is going on?