Adress pytest socketblocked exception issues (#2324)

### What kind of change does this PR introduce?

* Sets `SocketBlockedError` to a subset of the `Exception` class, so
that if ever it is encountered while `pytest-socket` is not installed
(e.g. in downstream libraries), it doesn't error out during failed HTTP
requests

### Does this PR introduce a breaking change?

No.

### Other information:

This should make it so that downstream libraries do not require
`pytest-socket`, but can still make use of it if they wish to.

Credit for this solution is owed to @aulemahal.

Author: Zeitsperre

CHANGELOG.rst

@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ Changelog
 
 v0.61.0 (unreleased)
 --------------------
-Contributors to this version: Pascal Bourgault (:user:`aulemahal`).
+Contributors to this version: Pascal Bourgault (:user:`aulemahal`), Trevor James Smith (:user:`Zeitsperre`).
 
 New indicators and features
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
@@ -18,6 +18,7 @@ Internal changes
     * Updated the ReadTheDocs configuration to build docs with an older Python version and a newer conda version.
     * Updated the `pre-commit` hooks (`check-jsonschema`) in order to accept the latest supported conda version in ReadTheDocs config.
     * Set ``docs/conf.py`` to ignore `sphinx_autodoc_typehints.guarded_import` errors raised by `xarray` type guarding.
+* Set `SocketBlockedError` to be a subset of the `Exception` class when `pytest-socket` is not installed. (:pull:`2324`).
 
 v0.60.0 (2026-01-23)
 --------------------

src/xclim/testing/utils.py

@@ -39,7 +39,10 @@
     from pytest_socket import SocketBlockedError
 except ImportError:
     pytest = None
-    SocketBlockedError = None
+
+    class SocketBlockedError(Exception):
+        pass
+
 
 try:
     import pooch