> I really dislike how it feels scientists are positioning themselves into politics more and more.
When you are aware of a major emergency coming our collective way, it is your duty to try and avoid it or mitigate its consequences. Any other behaviour would be unethical.
> I have less and less confidence that journals are attempting to describe and report without bias.
If you are talking about mainstream media, then fair enough. They most often suck at reporting science.
If you are talking about scientific journals, then at least I haven’t seen a major shift in “subjectivity”. Bearing in mind that any piece of writing is unavoidably subjective by nature. Science does not depend on individual scientists being perfectly objective people.
> Maybe it's because I hadn't read anything but tech related white papers pre-covid, but reading a ton of research during covid really lowered my expectations for the standard to which publishing scientists hold themselves to.
This has always been the case (ignoring the manure in predatory journal and obvious résumé padding). One article in itself is meaningless. Something can be considered probable if it has been validated separately by independent people. In case of global warming, an awful lot has been.
If you want to gauge the opinion of experts in a given field, it is more useful to read reviews or monographs than articles, which are always going to be limited in scope.