Jan,

It seems a little bit like you're confusing Medium with something like academia.edu. We're not publishing papers here. For a highly specific analysis of a detail of climate change, try https://www.academia.edu/1026074/Late_Cenozoic_climate_changes_in_China_s_western_interior_a_review_of_research_on_Lake_Qinghai_and_comparison_with_other_records

Medium is reportage; it's blogging. It's op-ed, rants, screeds, people basically doing long-form social media posts.

The better writers, IMHO, tend to have links to back up specific claims, but it’s still just blogging. It’s not for a peer-reviewed journal and it’s not for a major publication. Even top writers like Umair or Jessica Wildfire still only average a few hundred fans per article.

There's no doubt a bias toward outrage and moral panic because that gets traffic and the attention economy is all about traffic, whether you're a blogger or CNN. Hard dedication toward one side of an issue will almost always get more attention than nuance and middle ground.

It's a dilemma that's been around for a long time.