I've heard of some pretty strange things, but I've never heard of an air conditioned beach before. According to the Australian, the Palazzo Versace, a luxury hotel in Dubai set to open in 2010, is about to create the first climate controlled beach for the rich and famous. The 10-storey luxury hotel will house 169 apartments and 213 luxurious rooms, each with their own pool. But the main attraction will obviously be the famous refrigerated beach.

The article says the beach will have a network of pipes beneath the sand with coolants made to absorb the heat from the surface. The swimming pool's temperature will be controlled, and giant fans will be installed throughout to blow a gentle breeze over the so-called beach. Everything, including the thermostats, will be linked to computers in order to achieve that perfect temperature.

As you can imagine this project has environmentalists like Rachel Noble, a campaigns office at Tourism Concern, on the defensive. She says carbon generated by such projects would contribute to climate change. "Dubai is like a bubble world where the things that are worrying the rest of the world, like climate change, are simply ignored so that people can continue their destructive lifestyles," she said.