Climate Change Fraud

This is completely mad - I just got an email, inviting me to submit a paper to a global conference on Climate Change called "Climate Change Network Team 2011" or short: CCNT11, that was to be held in London, sponsored - naturally - by BP and PriceWaterHouseCoopers and the UK Government's Department of Climate Change. Presenters' travel costs would be covered and the conference would even be "certified carbon neutral"!!

But something was fishy... the conference was supposed to be from 9th-13th September 2011 (Wednesday till Sunday...) and applications to be a speaker were still open now (it's late August!) with a long list of possible topics.
And all one need to do to apply for participation was to send the title of one's presentation and name of presenter to an email address...
And then even stranger: "Accepted papers are added to the confirmed list on a 'first come, first served' basis. When the conference programme is full, no other papers will be considered for inclusion in the conference programme" - hmmm. Very odd.

So I googled CCNT11, which claimed to be held for the fourth year, and it turns out there was no coverage of the conference other than on its own website. Hmm. Weird. The website's whois record looked very odd, too and very soon I stumbled on this article by the BBC environment correspondent, showing an image of the very same website, only with a different name, advertising a conference in January 2011, which was shown to be a forgery.

I'm shocked! Well, a little at least - the goal appears to be to lure climate researchers from development countries with the fancy-looking website and many promises of sponsorship, publication etc etc to pay a small upfront "hotel reservation fee" in order to attend the conference...

Madness.
Check it out yourself: www.ccnt11.org

Oh - and by the way, the UK government has no "Department of Climate Change" :)