by Lori Deschene


Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.
- Aristotle

 
At the end of the day, when I feel completely exhausted, oftentimes it has nothing to do with all the things I’ve done.

It’s not a consequence of juggling multiple responsibilities and projects. It’s not my body’s way of punishing me for becoming a late-life jogger after a period of cardiovascular laziness. It’s not even about getting too little sleep.
When I’m exhausted, you can be sure I’ve bent over backwards trying to win everyone’s approval. I’ve obsessed over what people think of me, I’ve assigned speculative and usually inaccurate meanings to feedback I’ve received, and I’ve lost myself in negative thoughts about criticism and its merit.

I work at minimizing this type of behavior – and I’ve had success for the most part – but admittedly it’s not easy.
I remember back in college, taking a summer acting class, when I actually made the people around me uncomfortable with my defensiveness. This one time, the teacher was giving me feedback after a scene in front of the whole class. She couldn’t get through a single sentence without me offering some type of argument.
After a couple minutes of verbal sparring, one of my peers actually said, “Stop talking. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

Looking back, I cut myself a little slack. You’re vulnerable in the spotlight and the student’s reaction was kind of harsh. But I know I needed to hear it. Because I was desperately afraid of being judged, I took everything, from everyone as condemnation.

I realize criticism doesn’t always come gently from someone legitimately trying to help. A lot of the feedback we receive is unsolicited and doesn’t come from teachers—or maybe all of it does.

We can’t control what other people will say to us, whether they’ll approve or form opinions and share them. But we can control how we internalize it, respond to it, and learn from it, and when we release it and move on.

If you’ve been having a hard time dealing with criticism lately, it may help to remember the following:
The Benefits of Criticism:
 
Personal Growth
1. Looking for seeds of truth in criticism encourages humility. It’s not easy to take an honest look at yourself and your weaknesses, but you can only grow if you’re willing to try.
2. Learning from criticism allows you to improve. Almost every critique gives you a tool to more effectively create the tomorrow you visualize.
3. Criticism opens you up to new perspectives and new ideas you may not have considered. Whenever someone challenges you, they help expand your thinking.
4. Your critics give you an opportunity to practice active listening. This means you resist the urge to analyze in your head, planning your rebuttal, and simply consider what the other person is saying.
5. You have the chance to practice forgiveness when you come up against harsh critics. Most of us carry around stress and frustration that we unintentionally misdirect from time to time.
 
Emotional Benefits
6. It’s helpful to learn how to sit with the discomfort of an initial emotional reaction instead of immediately acting or retaliating. All too often we want to do something with our feelings—generally not a great idea!
7. Criticism gives you the chance to foster problem solving skills, which isn’t always easy when you’re feeling sensitive, self-critical, or annoyed with your critic.
8. Receiving criticism that hits a sensitive spot helps you explore unresolved issues. Maybe you’re sensitive about your intelligence because you’re holding onto something someone said to you years ago—something you need to release.
9. Interpreting someone else’s feedback is an opportunity for rational thinking—sometimes, despite a negative tone, criticism is incredibly useful.
10. Criticism encourages you to question your instinctive associations and feelings; praise is good, criticism is bad. If we recondition ourselves to see things in less black and white terms, there’s no stop to how far we can go!
 
Improved Relationships
11. Criticism presents an opportunity to choose peace over conflict. Oftentimes, when criticized our instinct is to fight, creating unnecessary drama. The people around us generally want to help us, not judge us.
12. Fielding criticism well helps you mitigate the need to be right. Nothing closes an open mind like ego—bad for your personal growth, and damaging for relationships.
13. Your critics give you an opportunity to challenge any people-pleasing tendencies. Relationships based on a constant need for approval can be draining for everyone involved. It’s liberating to let people think whatever they want—they’re going to do it anyway.
14. Criticism gives you the chance to teach people how to treat you. If someone delivers it poorly, you can take this opportunity to tell them, “I think you make some valid points, but I would receive them better if you didn’t raise your voice.”
15. Certain pieces of criticism teach you not to sweat the small stuff. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that your boyfriend thinks you load the dishwasher “wrong.”
 
Time Efficiency
16. The more time you spend dwelling about what someone said, the less time you have to do something with it.
17. If you improve how you operate after receiving criticism, this will save time and energy in the future. When you think about from that perspective—criticism as a time saver—it’s hard not to appreciate it!
18. Fostering the ability to let go of your feelings and thoughts about being critiqued can help you let go in other areas of your life. Letting go of worries, regrets, stresses, fears, and even positive feelings helps you root yourself in the present moment. Mindfulness is always the most efficient use of time.
19. Criticism reinforces the power of personal space. Taking 10 minutes to process your emotions, perhaps by writing in a journal, will ensure you respond well. And responding the well the first time prevents one critical comment from dominating your day.
20. In some cases, criticism teaches you how to interact with a person, if they’re negative or hostile, for example. Knowing this can save you a lot of time and stress in the future.
 
Self Confidence
21. Learning to receive false criticism—feedback that has no constructive value—without losing your confidence is a must if you want to do big things in life. The more attention your work receives, the more criticism you’ll have to field.
22. When someone criticizes you, it shines a light on your own insecurities. If you secretly agree that you’re lazy, you should get to the root of that. Why do you believe that—and what can you do about it?
23. Learning to move forward after criticism, even if you don’t feel incredibly confident, ensures no isolated comment prevents you from seizing your dreams. Think of it as separating the wheat from the chaff; takes what’s useful, leave the rest, and keep going!
24. When someone else appraises your harshly, you have an opportunity to monitor your internal self-talk. Research indicates up to 80% of our thoughts are negative. Take this opportunity to monitor and change your thought processes so you don’t drain and sabotage yourself!
25. Receiving feedback well reminds you it’s OK to have flaws—imperfection is part of being human. If you can admit weakness and work on them without getting down on yourself, you’ll experience far more happiness, peace, enjoyment, and success.

We are all perfectly imperfect, and other people may notice that from time to time. We may even notice in it each other.

Somehow accepting that is a huge weight off my mind.

Source: Tiny Buddha

Forwarded by Daily Good
 
Wholistic Musings:
 
This is such a wise series of observations!
 
Many people report such limiting beliefs and core beliefs about themselves. These can be released and replaced with positive beliefs by using WHEE
 
Blessings
 
Dan

Watch arriving passengers be given a welcome home to remember at Heathrow Terminal 5. Big thanks to all our talented singers who feature in the ad.  For updates, exclusive content and more info on our talented cast, join our new facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/tmobileuk

Forwarded by J. Warren Salmon, Ph.D. jsjwsalmon@gmail.com

Blessings

Dan

If the image does not appear on your screen above, please click on the link below.

Have you ever had misunderstandings in email communications - where someone read your email and completely mistook your intentions, perhaps even taking offense or feeling hurt, when you had no intention of coming across in such ways?

Emoticons have been developed to help avoid such problems. These are little yellow faces with varieties of expressions - most commonly a smiley face, but including angry, surprised and other such emotional expressions.

it is even more common to see a smiling      or sad face    in emails.

Here are a few suggestions for animal emoticons. I find that most people respond with warmth to them:

              
 

                                  

Good sources for images:

http://funpic.com

http://funnycatpix.com/pictures_2.htm

http://www.xmission.com/~emailbox/funnyphotos1.htm

http://www.funnydogsite.com/

Blessings

Dan Benor, MD
www.paintap.com

My impressions are strongly colored by the warm welcome I received from Mihaela and Simeon, my hosts in Bulgaria. These are extraordinary people who deeply connect with spiritual awareness and healing on many levels. They have been organizing seminars on various forms of healing for several years in Sofia, inviting teachers from England, Israel and other countries to share their wisdom in EFT, EMDR and related therapies.

It was fascinating to hear the story of the shift from Communist to democratic government. Under the old regime, everyone was cared for. Everyone had a home – however modest the accommodations, no one was out in the cold. Everyone had access to healthcare services and education. Although there were complaints about the quality of services, at least no one was without a roof over her or his head.

The weaknesses of the Communist system were evident in the shortages of food and commercial goods. While the theory of all working for the common good of all was a high ideal intended to inspire people to contribute their energies and time, in practice this did not work. Management and productivity, particularly in the agricultural and business sectors, were far from optimal. The repressiveness of the Communist regime is well known and needs no comment.

People got by with garden plots where they grew their own vegetables. This was a major source of food supplement, which helped tide people over their transition from the old regime to the new.

Today, the free market of a democratic government offers many more opportunities to live more luxuriously for those with initiative and some capital resources. However, cities are increasingly crowded with people who are following the allures of promises of a good life presented in the media; seeking a better lifestyle than they can achieve on farms. Housing is expensive, and medical care is expensive and strained to provide adequate services.

In this atmosphere, complementary therapies are a true blessing. WHEE is particularly helpful modality because it offers self-care for pain, stress and distress wherever and whenever needed. My WHEE workshop was well received, with an extra day added to the Practitioner Level 1 training to allow for translations.

Mihaela and Simeon were wonderful tour guides on a two-day exploration of a bit of the countryside East of Sofia. I was particularly taken with the little village where we stayed at a country inn. Here, as in other parts of Bulgaria, I found the food fresh and delicious (See details in previous blog entry.) People in the village live largely on the income provided by holiday visitors. They take care to maintain the quaintness of their architecture, requiring all buildings to have large slates on the roof and stone rather than paved streets.



In my inner travels, I found it easy to relate to the workshop participants as people and as healthcare professionals. WHEE and other wholistic healing approaches are particularly welcome in Bulgaria - in the context of the generally lower psychological awareness. General public awareness is more on levels I was used to seeing 40-50 years ago in the US. In parallel with this limited awareness is the continued prevalence of psychoanalytic approaches, with a growing but still limited awareness of more rapidly effective methods.

In contrast, Mihaela and Simeon in particular, and many of the workshop participants were delightfully, deeply aware of spiritual dimensions of life and our discussions were consistently stimulating and interesting. This is all the more remarkable for my hosts being in their 30's.

I was pleased to be invited to teach workshops on Spiritual Awareness and Healing and a WHEE Level 1 Practitioner Workshop in Sofia a week ago. I'm just about over my jet lag after my return.

My Bulgarian hosts, Mihaela and Simeon at the Institute for Integral Development, were a delight to work with and to visit with. We found ourselves very much in tune with each other in our wholistic understandings of life and healing interventions. More on this in my next blog.

Here, I want to share some of the physical context of my visit and observations on helpful lessons from visiting a distinctly different culture.

Sofia has absorbed several hundred thousands of people from the countryside since the transition from Communism to Democracy. The city is a hodge-podge mixture of old and new buildings, vehicles and cultural traditions. I was left with strong impressions about:

Healthy, tasty food available everywhere. Bulgaria has not joined the rest of the world in using chemical fertilizers, so its produce is close to organic in quality - though not identified by them as such. It was a delight to have yogurt in many dishes as well as in a popular local drink that has cucumbers shredded into it. The fresh cheeses were delicious. Here's a suggestion to replace nachos or french fries served in North America with the plastic orange goop that passes for cheese:

                         Shredded fresh white cheese on french fries.




Several technological innovations I'd like to see in North America:

A hotel room lighting system that requires insertion of your electronic door key card to activate. When you leave your room, you remove your card to take it with you and all the lights are shut off.





Parking meters are number coded so that you can enter the code in your cell phone and pay your parking fee electronically. If you're in a museum, a restaurant or a business meeting you can add minutes or hours through your cell phone.


In the city of Plovdiv the traffic lights have a count-down for cars (as well as pedestrians), helping people to anticipate when the lights will change.


On the down side, people still smoke in restaurants... Heavily!  There are no no-smoking sections.  Traffic in Sofia is very heavy from early AM to late PM.


Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. Challenging to read street and store signs!




But occasional Rosetta signs provide clues...

(Another clue is that you might order food to eat here)



(Some English in the bottom lines)


More to follow.

Blessings

Dan
http://benorwholisticblog.com/

It was a great pleasure teaching WHEE at the Complementary Medicine Selective Conference at St. George's University School of Medicine in Grenada. Several hundred students from this enormous medical school attended the conference, and dozens attended the workshops.

This is not your ordinary medical school:

There is a rigorous and demanding preparatory course for students who do not have the academic background for medical school but who are highly motivated to become doctors. If they pass the course, they are admitted to the regular medical school program. If they fail, their registration fees are refunded!

Grenada is a small island and does not have the clinical facilities for the hundreds of students in each class to continue into their clinical years. Graduates of the basic sciences courses proceed to their clinical years at affiliated medical schools in the US.

This is the good news. The bad news is that the Complementary Medicine Selective Conference is but a small part of a normal medical school curriculum. I was reminded of my own experiences in medical school in the 1960's. In many ways, little has changed since then. The academic pressures are so enormous that students are constantly stressed out to the max. There is little that they can do about their anxieties about the enormous burdens of studies, exams, finances, living in a foreign country, and an inhumane educational system.

I handled my own med student stresses by taking a year off between my second and third year in school on an NIMH Research Fellowship in Psychiatry. I had no words at that time to describe my stressful experiences, which were (and today continue to be) the expected, accepted norm for medical students.

It is very satisfying to be able to offer this generation of students the benefits of WHEE, which rapidly reduce anxieties and stress reactions and enable us to install positive thoughts and feelings to replace the negative ones we have released.

More on student stress in a following blog entry.

Blessings

Dan
http://benorwholisticblog.com/

To clarify my last entry:

The invaders I refer to are the ones on our TV; the ones who might perhaps more accurately be called corporate infiltrators – in our government, healthcare, education systems; and the ones in our banking system, for starters.

Blessings

Dan

Hi Rachel and Dennis,

I really like and agree with all of your observations, Dennis.

One subtle piece that I feel is relevant is the coming together of all consciousness on the planet to deal with the invaders. I believe it is this sort of coming together that can be helpful here, too. With love.

Sometimes, however, abuse and violence cannot be stopped without counter-force. Holding to a place of spirituality, love and healing when using counter-force is a real challenge. Aikido is a good example of this.

Blessings

Dan


On 8/10/10 11:31 AM, "Rachel Finney"  wrote:

I received this a while back from Dennis, but forgot to send it out.  Thoughtful perspective...

From Dennis Gaumond’s newsletter, Understanding the Shift

AVATAR

By Dennis Gaumond

While the movie, 'Avatar' was in theatres, I was in Costa Rica, so I just recently got around to seeing what all the fuss was about. I must say it is a remarkable movie - visually beautiful, very compelling - I give it five stars. I'm sure it will set a new standard in movie-making, much like 'Star Wars' did back in the Seventies.

I feel moved to comment on a couple of things about the movie that I didn't like so much.  The first is something that I call the 'Tarzan Syndrome'. Hollywood loves to put out themes where the world is in jeopardy and one man rises to the top to save the day. That messiah figure is always a white, Anglo-Saxon male, even if the story takes place in a foreign land. In the case of Tarzan, a child of white aristocratic descent is raised in Africa and soon becomes 'king of the jungle', despite the fact that black people have been living there for millennia. In the movie, 'Samurai', Tom Cruise quickly rises to become top gun in the Samurai world, despite the fact that all the other Samurai warriors have been living and training in this tradition for their entire lives. 'Avatar' continues in this Hollywood tradition - the hero/saviour is a white guy living in a cloned blue-body.

'Avatar' is similar to many Hollywood themes, including 'Star Wars' - there is a conflict between good and evil. In 'Avatar' we have corporate greed threatening the lives of a beautiful indigenous race living in harmony with nature - a metaphor for what has happened and continues to happen here on Earth. The movie succeeds in pointing out the problem, but like most Hollywood movies, falls far short in presenting the solution to the problem. Again the solution we are offered is war. The good guys find a way to defeat the bad guys in spectacular battle scenes - the hero and the villain meet in the final scenes to duke it out, etc.

Wouldn't it be refreshing if the movie offered a different solution? Wouldn't it be great if the movie gave us the spectacle of war, which the box office feels is necessary, but then the war effort fails and the good guys have to resort to something else. What if the good guys ultimately win by using the power of their collective consciousness to send light to the darkness - to change the minds of the bad guys by sending them love? Wouldn't that be a breath of fresh air? But Hollywood prefers to give us clichéd stories with predictable outcomes, and we continue to eat them up.

They say that the true nature of misinformation, which we are fed constantly by all forms of mass-media, is that it consists of 90% truth and 10% distorted truth. The 90% truth gets our attention, and then the distortion subtly misinforms us, leading us off of the path and keeping us ignorant. It is certainly easy to see that the news media employs these tactics. I feel that 'Avatar' is yet another example of this.

Even the use of the word 'avatar' is a distortion. An Avatar is an incarnation of divinity, an enlightened, ascended being who descends into physical form in order to help, usually by offering teachings. An Avatar is a being of pure love, incapable of violence. I believe that we are being misinformed when we are given the idea that our problems will be solved by some messiah figure who will lead us through the battle. We can't sit around waiting for 'the chosen one'. We must solve our problems together, collectively.

I truly believe that war is not, and never will be, the answer to the human dilemma. Even when one side is clearly and obviously 'good', which is rarely the case, we will never ward off evil on the battlefield. We cannot fight darkness with more darkness. Love is the only solution.
 
Source: whyislife.com

Dear Wholistic Healing community,

 

Letme share a few thoughts about what I see as the potential and mission of all healers today:

 

Ifeel that the dense lack of awareness of people being energies and Spirit aswell as being material beings is a root cause (if not THE root cause) of manyof the world’s problems.

 

Isee the Wholistic Healing Community as a potential node for bringing more awareness and more healinginto the world.

 

Hereis a quote that speaks to this:

 

"Tome, I represent a unified field of love, so therefore I am a spokesperson forthe divine spark in all, which is going to be more and more illuminated as wedraw closer and closer to the prophesized shift date 2012… When this takesplace and the veils are lifted, including the one between life and death - wewill be given full access to the cosmos as galactic voyagers with free reign toaccess all levels of our being and existence. It is like the true power of Gaiathat regenerates itself and opens us up to its cosmic immortal nature, has beenreplaced by a force that carries parasitic beings that attach to people,harmful frequencies that control even the weather - also mind control, who feedoff of anything that gives it power because one is unaware of its influence.Without most of humanity knowing it, they are feeding this force. This is whatI was preparing to confront - those who are behind the technologies andagreements that keep us locked in global exile from the rest of the universeand our true selves. Our current reality is not fully running on the creativepower of each individual or our freedom and divinity - that part of us issomewhat sabotaged in exchange for a fear producing world filled with misusesof power, suffering, environmental degradation, Natural Disasters and neglectof those who are in great need. Our collective imbalance is what causes anyoutward imbalance, and it is due to this divine spark being so veiled andhidden, that we function on a whole other system that is completely out ofalignment with our organic make-up. The blueprints that the planet holds, weare meant to be aligned to in order to create in accordance with naturalcycles, the planetary grid and then also find in our own beings, the union ofpolarities. With this type of awareness, we can bridge the separation of Earthand the Heavens and understand different technologies and how they either workagainst or with our environment. We need to co-create with the Mother energy,there is only so much that this force can do, and now is the time tounify."

 

-Laura Magdalene Eisenhower -- Taken from 2012 and the Ancient Game:Venus-Sophia and Recruitment to Mars<http://sites.google.com/site/lauramagdalene/home/2012-and-the-ancient-game>

-More about her recent revelations in this article<http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2912-Seattle-Exopolitics-Examiner%7Ey2010m2d10-Whistleblower-Laura-Magdalene-Eisenhower-Ikes-greatgranddaughter-outs-secret-Mars-colony-project>  by long-time ERN subscriber AlfredLambremont Webre

-Forwarded by Jean Hudon Jean Hudon globalvisionary@earthrainbownetwork.com

 

‘Avatar,’the top hit film of all time, shows a variation of how the world could look inits oneness. It is good to see that somewhere inside the collectiveconsciousness there are resonations with this vision.

 

Manyare awakening to the oneness of all Creation.

 

Wethe Wholistic Healing Community can serve to facilitate this awakening and healing of our planet.

 

Withoutthis awakening, we are headed for disasters of unprecedented proportions.

 

Evenwith the awareness, we may have passed tipping points beyond which disastersare inevitable. In that case, the Wholistic Healing Community can be a node for bringing more healingto those transitioning out of our morass, and to whatever survivors remain.

 

Bybringing together the diverse visions of a healing reality distilled throughthe diverse members of the Wholistic Healing Community, we can come to a common denominator ofawareness and understanding of the deeper realities where we connect with ourhealing consciousness.

 

Workingtogether, we could be a greater healing presence on this fraught and imperiledplanet of ours.

 

Howcan we achieve this?

 

Canwe get beyond our differences and separation to work together?

 

Thatis our most important challenge.

 

Theclock is ticking...

What are YOU contributing to this healing?

 

Blessings

 

Dan

Various thinly supported theories are put forward to suggest we are mistaken about global heating threatening the existence of every living organism on our planet Earth.

Here are a few observations on this subject from a recent email exchange with a wise friend, whose judgment i generally hold in very high respect and esteem.

And would you gamble, Jim, on this thinly supported theory, if you had the ability to control one or the other set of variables that are proposed to be causal in anticipated catastrophic climate change?

My read on the recent colder winters is from James Lovelock, who observed
"Despite the heat absorbed, the global temperature did not rise; in fact it fell slightly, perhaps because to melt ice it takes eighty-one times as much heat as to raise the same quantity of water one degree. This property of ice is called its “latent heat.” You can see this yourself by making a near full cup of tea with boiling water. It will be too hot even to sip. Adding cold water to cool it quickly rarely works; but add a single ice cube and it will be cool enough to drink in a few seconds. In a few more years all that floating ice may go, and then the sun will be free to heat the dark Arctic Ocean, No longer will it have the Sisyphean task of trying to melt white, reflecting ice that rejects 80 percent of the sunlight it receives so that to melt it consumes most of the radiant energy that would otherwise warm the ocean."
Lovelock, James. The Vanishing Face of Gaia- A Final Warning. New York, NY: Basic Books 2009, p. 16-17.

For gambling odds, see this excellent discussion
Risks of global heating
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCXg

Blessings

Dan

---

Forwarded by: Jim and Andrea MacKimmie
Fw: Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age

This is the kind of information that has been ignored and suppressed by the fans of Anthropogenic Global Warming. It indicates the influence of Man is a negligible factor in the climatology of the Earth, and will remain so. Man’s hubris and ignorance continue to be the most detrimental impediments to his health, peace and happiness on this Earth. In fact, the only truly significant geophysical problem being significantly impacted by human indulgence and stupidity is pollution of the oceans, and while that will not in any way permanently damage the Earth, which over a long time can self purify, it might engender a temporary, accelerating toxicity that would endanger mankind much faster than it has even been imagined Global Warming ever could.   jb

Earth on the Brink of an Ice  Age

by Gregory F.  Fegel

The earth is now on the brink of  entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence  from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide  our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve  thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and  then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000  years.

Ice cores, ocean sediment cores,  the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all  demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each  last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each  lasting about 12,000 years.

Most of the long-term climate  data collected from various sources also shows a strong correlation with the  three astronomical cycles which are together known as the Milankovich cycles.  The three Milankovich cycles include the tilt of the earth, which varies over  a 41,000 year period; the shape of the earthâs orbit, which changes over a  period of 100,000 years; and the Precession of the Equinoxes, also known as  the earthâs "wobble," which gradually rotates the direction of the earthâs  axis over a period of 26,000 years. According to the Milankovich theory of Ice  Age causation, these three astronomical cycles, each of which effects the  amount of solar radiation which reaches the earth, act together to produce the  cycle of cold Ice Age maximums and warm interglacials.

Elements of the astronomical  theory of Ice Age causation were first presented by the French mathematician  Joseph Adhemar in 1842, it was developed further by the English prodigy Joseph  Croll in 1875, and the theory was established in its present form by the  Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovich in the 1920s and 30s. In 1976 the  prestigious journal Science published a landmark paper by John Imbrie,  James Hays, and Nicholas Shackleton entitled "Variations in the Earth's orbit:  Pacemaker of the Ice Ages," which described the correlation which the trio of  scientist/authors had found between the climate data obtained from ocean  sediment cores and the patterns of the astronomical Milankovich cycles. Since  the late 1970s, the Milankovich theory has remained the predominant theory to  account for Ice Age causation among climate scientists, and hence the  Milankovich theory is always described in textbooks of climatology and in  encyclopaedia articles about the Ice Ages.

In their 1976 paper Imbrie,  Hays, and Shackleton wrote that their own climate forecasts, which were based  on sea-sediment cores and the Milankovich cycles, "· must be qualified in two  ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic  trends ö and not to anthropogenic effects such as those due to the burning of  fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they  are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer.  Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted... the results  indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards  extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate."

During the 1970s the famous  American astronomer Carl Sagan and other scientists began promoting the theory  that "greenhouse gasses" such as carbon dioxide, or CO2, produced by human  industries could lead to catastrophic global warming. Since the 1970s the  theory of "anthropogenic global warming" (AGW) has gradually become accepted  as fact by most of the academic establishment, and their acceptance of AGW has  inspired a global movement to encourage governments to make pivotal changes to  prevent the worsening of AGW.

The central piece of evidence  that is cited in support of the AGW theory is the famous "hockey stick" graph  which was presented by Al Gore in his 2006 film An  Inconvenient Truth. The "hockey stick" graph shows an acute upward  spike in global temperatures which began during the 1970s and continued  through the winter of 2006/07. However, this warming trend was interrupted  when the winter of 2007/8 delivered the deepest snow cover to the Northern  Hemisphere since 1966 and the coldest temperatures since 2001. It now appears  that the current Northern Hemisphere winter of 2008/09 will probably equal or  surpass the winter of 2007/08 for both snow depth and cold  temperatures.

The main flaw in the AGW theory  is that its proponents focus on evidence from only the past one thousand years  at most, while ignoring the evidence from the past million years ö evidence  which is essential for a true understanding of climatology. The data from  paleoclimatology provides us with an alternative and more credible explanation  for the recent global temperature spike, based on the natural cycle of Ice Age  maximums and interglacials.

In 1999 the British journal  Nature published the results of data derived from glacial ice cores  collected at the Russiaâs Vostok station in Antarctica during the 1990s. The  Vostok ice core data includes a record of global atmospheric temperatures,  atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and airborne particulates starting  from 420,000 years ago and continuing through history up to our present  time.

The graph of the Vostok ice core data shows that the Ice  Age maximums and the warm interglacials occur within a regular cyclic pattern,  the graph-line of which is similar to the rhythm of a heartbeat on an  electrocardiogram tracing. The Vostok data graph also shows that changes in  global CO2 levels lag behind global temperature changes by about eight hundred  years. What that indicates is that global temperatures precede or cause global  CO2 changes, and not the reverse. In other words, increasing atmospheric CO2  is not causing global temperature to rise; instead the natural cyclic increase  in global temperature is causing global CO2 to rise.

The reason that global CO2  levels rise and fall in response to the global temperature is because cold  water is capable of retaining more CO2 than warm water. That is why carbonated  beverages loose their carbonation, or CO2, when stored in a warm environment.  We store our carbonated soft drinks, wine, and beer in a cool place to prevent  them from loosing their "fizz," which is a feature of their carbonation, or  CO2 content. The earth is currently warming as a result of the natural Ice Age  cycle, and as the oceans get warmer, they release increasing amounts of CO2  into the atmosphere.

Because the release of CO2 by  the warming oceans lags behind the changes in the earthâs temperature, we  should expect to see global CO2 levels continue to rise for another eight  hundred years after the end of the earthâs current Interglacial warm period.  We should already be eight hundred years into the coming Ice Age before global  CO2 levels begin to drop in response to the increased chilling of the worldâs  oceans.

The Vostok ice core data graph  reveals that global CO2 levels regularly rose and fell in a direct response to  the natural cycle of Ice Age minimums and maximums during the past four  hundred and twenty thousand years. Within that natural cycle, about every  110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked  at approximately the same levels which they are at today.

Today we are again at the peak,  and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter  the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it.  The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle,  with or without any influence from the effects of AGW.

The AGW theory is based on data  that is drawn from a ridiculously narrow span of time and it demonstrates a  wanton disregard for the "big picture" of long-term climate change. The data  from paleoclimatology, including ice cores, sea sediments, geology,  paleobotany and zoology, indicate that we are on the verge of entering another  Ice Age, and the data also shows that severe and lasting climate change can  occur within only a few years. While concern over the dubious threat of  Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to distract the attention of people  throughout the world, the very real threat of the approaching and inevitable  Ice Age, which will render large parts of the Northern Hemisphere  uninhabitable, is being foolishly ignored.

This article originally appeared in Pravda.