The difficult part is figuring things out. You'd be amazed how easy stuff is once someone else has figured it all out. Scientific papers mostly are written to be obtuse on purpose. But they don't matter. The data the paper is based on matters.

Scientific papers remind me of translators that want to be clever in their subs. I watch a lot of foreign language stuff and there have been occasions, when I was understanding the original language that I don't actually speak for a sentence, but couldn't make sense of the English subtitles under it.

Science really isn't that hard. There's just some gatekeeping involved, but once you see past the bullshit, it's fairly simple. And yes, I trust myself more than journalists to understand the underlying data.

As for climate stuff, I haven't found any data that paints the picture the media is selling. I keep asking for data when the topic comes up, but no one has been able to provide anything so far proving that humans influence the climate. Yeah, temperatures go up (global warming), but then not consistently, so the buzz word got changed, but that's just climate in general. Some glaciers have been melting for hundreds of years and I've also heard that we are at the end of an Ice Age. Earth had a couple of those before humans even were around. And yeah, when they end things tend to get warmer.

By the way, did you hear what happened to the ozone hole? This was all over the media some twenty odd years ago with the goal to ban something and then they did and everyone just stopped talking about it. I'm pretty sure it's still there, though. But I guess no one wants to use it's existence to ban something anymore.