The following e-mail recently made its way to my inbox:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Random Selection as Development/Campaign Partner.

We hereby notify you that you have been selected as a partner in the World Campaign against Global Warming.

In this program, you will be required to organize a pro-environmental campaign against global warming and environmental pollution in your area/community with the funds provided to you by the World Foundation against Global Warming.

Note that this selection is subject to your acceptance and consent.

If you choose to accept this offer, you shall be awarded the sum of $610,000 and $950,000 for Individual and Corporate participation respectively. This sum is intended to facilitate your campaign.

Kindly respond, stating your acceptance to this notification and we shall give you more information on this program. Contact Mr. Zeeshan Ashraf on: zeeraf12@aol.com

The Earth is our habitation and we are responsible for it.

Faithfully,

Paul Brendan McGee
Our World Foundation.
Program Coordinator,
Campaign against Global Warming

www.ourworldfoundation.org.uk
www.globalwarming.org

Our World Foundation and GlobalWarming.org are legitimate entities, although I am sure that both organizations would be shocked to learn of their employment in service of this "campaign." Google returns zero hits for either the name "Paul Brendan McGee" or the name "Zeeshan Ashraf" in combination with the keywords "global warming."

Which means this is an extremely fresh variety of spam, indeed, as one of the virtues of the Web is that there are scores of sites dedicated to archiving and cataloging all the myriad iterations of scam spam clogging the arteries of the Internet. There are even compilations of all the e-mail addresses that have been included in scam e-mails, and guess what: "zeeraf12@aol.com" is on the list, having previously appeared on a "fake lottery" variant of the classic Nigerian 419 fraud.

Now that global warming has graduated to the rarefied status previously enjoyed primarily by deceased dictators of African countries, I think we can truly say that climate change has come of age.