Climategate, Fake-gate, and climate data itself have combined to cause the public to view with a skeptical eye claims by climate alarmists that the end is nigh.

Every once in a while, the desperation of the alarmists, including, sadly, of scientists who see their incomes at risk from losing the ability to find funding for studies aiming to prove substantial human impact on climate, is laid bare. After all, there isn’t a lot of money to be made by proving that there isn’t a major problem, or even that there is a problem but the cost of “solving” it far outweighs the possible risks.

Sometimes the alarmists’ desperation is truly amusing.

If you were trying to convince Canadians that the world might come to a horrific end, what would be the first thing you’d claim was threatened by climate change?

A gold star for you if you said hockey.

Thus it offered a good chuckle when I saw an article in Canada’s National Post ( a publication which is one of the best in allowing climate “skeptics” to express their data and opinions) entitled “Global warming could spell the end of Canada’s outdoor hockey rink.”

Seriously, the article starts with this: “A team of Canadian climate scientists is predicting the widespread disappearance of outdoor hockey rinks across the country in the next 50 years due to global warming — with some regions of the sport’s spiritual birthplace likely to witness an even earlier eclipse of old-time shinny on natural ice.”

What the authors did was to accept the standard and fatally flawed UN climate projections, and then to say these predictions suggest a threat to Canada’s national sport — indeed to Canada’s national identity.

I trust that Canadians, who have demonstrated some wisdom in recent years by electing, and re-electing, a center-right government which has embarked on reductions in the size and cost of government, will not be fooled by this obvious, almost pathetic, desperation.