Guardian, DailyMail Online: From different newspaper traditions, two good stories (ocean sequestration and UK climate)

Two UK newspapers of widely different reputations turned out high-grade stories that happened to pass the tracker's radar this morning (most of which was spent clearing out emails after spending a four days in a remote and lofty drainage in the eastern High Sierra, much of it chasing grandchildren to unhook their quarry – brook trout, or 'brookies.' Also to unsnarl their spinning reels. Hmm. Why are they called spinning reels? Their main point is that their reels, more properly their spools, don't spin!).

1) Good News, Sort of, for ocean carbon sequestration:

• The Guardian – Damian Carrington: Dumping iron at sea can bury carbon for centuries, study shows  ; A Nature study, on which we may find many more stories to round up tomorrow, concludes that iron fertilization really does spur plankton growth – and sends the corpses of the little organisms sinking with their carbon to the deep deep sea. However, Carrington reports a bit deeper, it is hard to expect such practices could have huge impact on overall carbon levels – something worth doing, maybe, but no game changer. Best moment is his aside, abruptly brought up, noting that the source he's quoting is a vegetarian. One then encounters argument, orthogonal to the story's main line, that mass shunning of meat diets might also be geoengineering.

2) The confusion over UK weather, climate, and all the Arctic sea ice that's melting away:

• MailOnline – Michael Hanlon : Climate change: forget heatwave fantasies and start planning for floods ; The hed oversimplifies a decent, chatty analysis of what front-rank researchers say about how changes in the Arctic ocean can radiate far into more southern latitudes. Reality is not agreeing with a lot of what theory had led researchers to expect. But rather than a cheeky put-down of weather professors and climate guessers, this is a reasonable and sensible discussion why such contradictions occur. No contrarian, Hanlon writes, ".. despite the confusion over how the individual seasons will pan out, there does seem to be a consensus that in a warmer world generally was will see more extremes." The Mail, tab to its heart, nonetheless really is churning out some well-constructed science reports lately.

-Charlie Petit