I looked up the correct URL for the Watts report:

https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/2022_Surf...

Well, I haven't yet seen you change any of your opinions, but obviously that isn't proof you're unwilling, so I don't think trying to figure out other people's willingness is very productive. How would anyone ever know? If someone is putting in the effort to cite sources and defend their position, it makes sense IMO to assume a default of good faith argumentation. The alternative is a kind of nihilism. Indeed, I'm willing to continue. It's you who aren't! So, who is most willing to change their views?

Let's agree that our disagreement here stems originally from a disagreement over the nature of citing sources. I'd prefer to discuss the original claims (the leaves, as you put it), or at least finish discussing them, with the source excerpts being there to back up those claims only. You'd prefer to debate the entirety of the sources themselves as part of determining the validity of the original claims. Am I right in understanding this is because you don't (yet) believe the specific claims about the airport, the logbooks, etc? Or do you accept that this problem did occur and now wish to have a broader debate? Also how wide does this go? Will you bring up non-cited articles by the same author? Non-climate articles on the same site?

Getting more towards the roots. There seem to be three "branches" of this tree. (1) the RAF airport, I believe this has been proven conclusively unless you think Morrison is inventing FOIA requests and things out of whole cloth so let's put that to one side now, (2) data adjustment vs improved instrument quality and (3) the sea ice chart.

I've already laid out my views (and those of zacharees I guess and lots of other people) when it comes to (2). We don't accept the idea that scientists should just suck up data of arbitrarily low quality, do some processing and then demand the public blindly trusts that the data is fixed. Jet exhaust spikes being declared climate change are clear evidence that this fixing process doesn't work properly, but there's also a logical circularity issue. Anyway. No need to repeat all that as I wrote it out above.

That leaves (pun intended har har) (3) the sea ice chart. It helps to have context here about what Morrison believes. His line is that global warming was real, but "started to run out of steam 20 years ago" as he put it. He thinks that CO2 saturates i.e. climate response isn't linear but logarithmic and that whilst there was indeed some industrial warming in the 20th century, in the last 20 years most impact on temperatures has been a mix of natural factors like El Ninos and poor data handling by climatologists. The 1980-2010 trend line remains because, firstly, climate skeptics don't like tampering with charts! These charts are generated by government provided websites and the standard in that community is to use the generated images as-is. And secondly, because it doesn't contradict his views on what's happening. Indeed he calls it out specifically, "As can be seen in the graph above, the decline rate of the sea ice extent is not far off the 1981-2010 average and well above 2012" so I don't understand why you say he didn't even remove it. Why would he? He goes on to talk about natural cycles and the AMO/PDO, so it's a part of his argument. The chart supports that view because if sea ice were driven purely by human activity (the standard line we're fed) then sea ice should continue to decline year-on-year but there's been no effect from the last 10 years of emissions, apparently. So clearly natural variation is dominating here.