About Stan

“Looking Forward”

Stan Hall intends to be a writer.

The idea is to use his background in science and development of technology, combined with a love for travel and an almost compulsive love of reading, learning and puzzle solving to improve his personal understanding of the problems and opportunities facing humankind - then to write about it.

Aside from articles to be posted on this web site, aspirations include magazine articles and books. The new digital camera system is seen as an aid to magazine publishing.

Stan has been working on a book based on travel experiences in the Belize and Guatemala, the heartland of the ancient Maya civilization. Aside from the lost civilization of the Maya the book focuses on still mysterious aspects of the loss of the great dinosaurs, volcanoes,global weather with particular interest in huricanes, drought, sea level and climate change. Belize is a superb location to think about climate change because much of the country was flooded near the end of the last great episode of rising sea levels to depths similar to what might be expected along present day coastlines when the Greenland icesheet melts. The resulting lagoon and coastal wetlands is the main reason that he has tentatively called his first book "PLanet Belize, Leaning into the Winds of Climate Change." Belize also illustrates natural processes critical for regulation of global climate through ongoing removal of carbon based greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and storage as carbonate rock and as through formation of fossil fuels. He believes that We interfer with either of these natural process through acidification of the oceans and burning fossil fuels at great peril. Our grandchildren will wonder how we could have been so ignorantly destructive. At any rate he is fascinated by the situation and compelled to write about it, always with the hope that humankind is smart enough to not only recognize an extremely serious problem but to accept the need to change behaviours as well as to develop appropriate new energy technologies.

“Experience, Career and Education”

• Stan worked for a manufacturing company in the years prior to retirement with resposibilities for product development, testing and quality control. Akrilon Industries makes and markets wall coatings and an exterior insulation system that can play a role in reducing the heating and cooling requirements, hence carbon emmissions of homes and work spaces. Stan became proficient with use of a computer system that emulate temperatures, heat and moisture tranfer through wall systems of various designs in different climate zones as weather conditons change throughout the year. He points out that consideration of temperatures, heat and moisture transfer on a planetary scale is an excellent way to think about those mysterious concepts called wind and rain, global climate, global warming and climate change.
• Dr Hall is proud to have spent many years as a research associate in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Laboratory of Environmental Engineering at the University of Calgary. Work was supported by the Alberta Oils Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA), a remarkable organization that played a key role in transformation of a geological curiosity into a truely major energy resource. Stan worked on an upgrading process for bitumen as well as on improved technologies for utilzation of by-product coke, water reycling and handling waste tailings streams. He became sensitized to the incredible size of the energy industry and its potential for both regional and global impact.
• As a junior faculty member at the University of Calgary, Dr Hall attempted to establish a program for study of the chemical factors that determine interactions between crop plants and insects with a focus on possible alternative approaches to pest control. The compexities of eccosystems where many species live and interact became a continuing source of fascination.
• Dr. Hall enjoyed post-doctoral studies relating to biosynthesis, metabolism and enzymology in the Department of Chemistry at the Univerity of Liverpool in England then at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) in the USA. He learned how to dissasemble plants, animals and microorganisms and study the molecules of which they are made with the objective of working in either the pharmaceutical industry or in medical research. International experience fostered a taste for travel and learning about the foibles and priorites, the lives and loves of other folk, as well as the special wonders of the landscape, regional climate, plants, animals and ecosystems that sustain them.
• Dr. Ernest Stanley Hall, PhD, Chemistry, University of British Columbia, 1966, found that formal training equiped him with the ability and inclination to visualize the world at the nano-scale. This is the scale of basic structures for minerals and materials including earth, air and water as well as for living organisms. This is the scale of atoms and molucules, electrons and light. At the nano-scale heat is a matter of order and disorder, motion and vibration and fire is a fast chemical reaction accompanying changes of molecular structure.