John Scarffe, Peak to Peak. Scientist, author and Mountain-Ear columnist Clyde Burnett passed away on May 27, 2020. The Mountain-Ear dedicated its June 4 edition to him, and wrote, “This edition is dedicated in Loving Memory of Clyde Burnett. Clyde wrote his column, “Climate Conversations” for the paper from October of 2014 to May of 2020.”
Friend William Tucker wrote in an email that Clyde attended Rudd High School in Mason City, Iowa, with the class of 1941. He played baseball and basketball for three years and was in the band all four years.
Clyde was the class valedictorian. Tucker’s grandfather was the school superintendent and math teacher, and he said Clyde was a very good student and excellent in math.
Those were the years when Mason City, Iowa, held the Mason City Band Festival and drew 100 bands because Meredith Willson, who wrote The Music Man, grew up in Mason City. Clyde was part of the clarinet section with Tucker’s mom, Tucker wrote.
Clyde attended Upper Iowa University, and the school used to call him once a month asking for donations. He told them he wouldn’t give them any money until they started teaching more courses in climate science. They have to take a climate class, and he wrote a lot of letters to a lot of people saying so.
After the University, Clyde went into the military, and they sent him to Wisconsin and Chicago. Then he flew 41 trips from New York to Scotland and back again. During that time, Clyde visited Paris and traveled some.
Upon the 50th anniversary of the Rudd High School Class of 1941, Clyde sent a letter summarizing his activities since leaving high school. About his military service, he wrote, “Not surprisingly, my world travels began with my military service. As a weather reconnaissance officer, I made 41 round trips across the North Atlantic in a C-54 aircraft with a four-engine propeller.”
In the letter, Clyde talked about studying meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Chicago for the military, Tucker wrote. Clyde wrote, “Since 1975, I’ve worked on the environmental problem of stratospheric ozone - it’s depleted by men’s activities.” Betsy, my second spouse who I was with for 15 years, is a co-investigator in this research.
She does the computer work. I take the measurements. In particular, we measure and analyze the behavior of atmospheric hydroxyl (a fragment of water vapor), which is actively involved in the atmospheric chemistry of ozone and the nitrogen and chlorine compounds which destroy ozone.
“We’ve made observations primarily at the Fritz Peak observatory in Colorado but also from South Florida, Alaska, Micronesia and New Zealand. We have the only database in the world on the total hydroxyl.”
Clyde and Betsy were divorced in 1992. According to LinkedIn, Burnett was an atmospheric scientist and author specializing in atmospheric hydroxyl measurements and was a guest scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) at the Fritz Peak Atmospheric Observatory south of Rollinsville, Colorado.
During a June 10, 2020, science meeting, members paid tribute to Clyde and his career. Before the facility became the Chemical Sciences Laboratory and before the Chemical Sciences Division, they were the Aeronomy Laboratory.
“A few of us from those days remain, here and scattered around the country and world, and we remember the old Aeronomy Lab days, and Clyde, with fondness. As noted by George Mount, another former Aeronomy Labber (now retired from Washington State University and an Emeritus Professor at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), “Well, that is the end of an era.”
He said, “Clyde was a professor at Florida Atlantic University beginning in 1965 and spent most of his career there; however, early in the 1970’s he became interested in hydroxyl chemistry in the upper atmosphere and built a PEPSIOS interferometer to measure the small atmospheric absorption of sunlight by hydroxyl. The PEPSIOS was a high spectral resolution interferometer utilizing three Fabry-Perot etalons in series.”
Clyde continued his PEPSIOS OH measurements at the observatory for 33 years, even after his research was no longer supported. He developed a long, long data record in which he applied himself diligently to taking data nearly every possible day and maintaining a long-term calibration on the same instrument all those years.
He and his then-wife, Betsy Beaver Burnett, were a husband and wife team who made the measurements and interpreted the observations to understand the HOx (hypochlorous and hypobromous acids) chemistry of the upper atmosphere. Clyde made the measurements and Betsy did analysis and put the data into a chemical scenario.
Mount said, “We all remember Clyde sitting on that stool for hour after hour and using nitrogen to scan the system, watching carefully with his little magnifying glass to see if the scan was at a limit! Clyde reported on his results regularly at AGU meetings for many years through thick and thin.
“Some of his conclusions were controversial and the discussions usually revealed the more colorful aspects of Clyde. He was writing a summary paper of all his years of observations for publication when he passed. Time marches on,” Mount said.
Ken Minschwaner, who as a master’s degree student worked with Clyde on OH at the Peak and went on to Harvard for his PhD, is now the Marvin H. Wilkening Professor of Physics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. He learned that Clyde was co-author on a book “Atomic and Nuclear Physics” published January 1, 1956.
Ken said, “I knew about Clyde’s old book on Modern Physics because the story goes that Betsy used it in one of her courses, and that’s how she struck up a conversation after one of his talks. I remembered a book “The Greenhouse Effect: A Legacy” that Clyde had brought in and autographed for me around 2007 or 2008, laughing as he let me in on the secret that very few people knew. He was the author, Alex Cook.”
“Alex Cook” wrote seven books, six fiction and one on science, and his last one was published six months ago. He started writing fiction in 2006, finally fessing up to being Clyde Burnett in his last book. According to the back of the book: “Alex Cook is the pen name of Dr. Clyde R. Burnett, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Florida Atlantic University. He currently lives in the Colorado mountains near the NOAA Fritz Peak Atmospheric Observatory, where as a visiting scientist he secured 33 years of measurements of atmospheric hydroxyl, related to the problem of stratospheric ozone. He has recently given attention to the science of global warming and climate change.”
According to a January 2019 Mountain-Ear article, just two miles South of Rollinsville sits a three-story structure which is tan, square and plain, but surrounded by woods and petite cabins. Clyde Burnett is there, and he detailed his publishable research and his 33-year series of measurements he took at the Fritz, which is the longest data set in the world related to the ozone problem. Starting in 1977, with research support from the National Science Foundation and NASA, Clyde designed and built the tool to measure hydroxyl levels in the atmosphere which collected at the Fritz Lab and around the world.
Just three years later, in 1980, scientists would discover ozone depletion and Clyde’s research, showing a corresponding 40 percent increase in hydroxyl levels in the atmosphere, helped to clarify the problem at hand. “The ozone depleting culprit would later be identified as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and the world would famously spring to action to address and solve the problem, but because of Clyde’s research, we would know how our atmosphere had been forever changed and so learn that, for every cause, there is an effect,” according to The Mountain-Ear.
Burnett talked about his little A-frame cabin on Lump Gulch, which backs to national forest, where he’s lived for 29 years. He showed pictures of horse drawn carriages, like the ones he used to drive as a kid on a farm in Iowa, and the green pinto he drove to the top of the Continental Divide through the now defunct Needle's Eye Tunnel.
In one of his first columns he wrote, “Our planet’s natural laws of heat trapping by the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect have been plodding along without pause. And Earth’s response will occur independently of our awareness of the cause.”
Clyde told The Mountain-Ear, “Climate change is a big problem. It’s a big problem. We need to do everything we can to fix it. We, each of us, need to be leaders.”
In his April 5, 2020, Mountain-Ear column, Clyde wrote, “Human population increase stimulates global warming and environmental pollution. Crowding enables infections like coronavirus to proliferate and cause pandemics. Human response is dependent on politics and cooperation.
“Empty grocery shelves and stadium seats and the lack of medical necessities may be followed by congressional stimulus to the economy. Will this allow us to survive the pandemic? The bottom line is that we are reminded of the fragility of life and human constructs and the absolute necessity of respecting science.
“Recall the Physics Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman’s reminder that however elegant the theory, if it disagrees with careful measurements, it’s wrong. Recall also his post-Challenger TV presentation of the many years of computer work in space research with its bottom line of O-ring behavior at ice water temperature.
“My 33 years of Fritz Peak atmospheric research failed to agree with major institutions’ theory and measurements. The bottom line is my careful reanalysis of the chemistry and structure of the lower stratosphere. This has been given restricted communication and can be found in the local Gilpin library.”
Clyde Ray Burnett is survived by his children; Beverly O’Reilly (Mike), Amelia Island, Florida; Pamela Van Scotter (Bruce Hurd), Colorado Springs, Colorado; Janet Summers (Rick), Deerfield Beach, Florida; and Craig Burnett (Alison), Boca Raton, Florida. As well as eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by parents Neil and Grace Ella (Aiken) Burnett and daughter Marcia Burnett.
There will be no service. The family will scatter ashes in places that were special to Clyde.
If you wish to honor Clyde’s memory, please plant a tree or make a contribution to 350.org, and make an effort to educate yourself about the climate issues that were so important to Clyde.
(Originally published in the June 18, 2020, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)
