Veerabhadran Ramanathan

About

Veerabhadran “Ram” Ramanathan discovered the greenhouse effect of CFCs (cholorofluorocarbons) in 1975 and showed that a ton each of CFC-11 and CFC-12 has more global warming effect than 10,000 tons of CO2. This discovery established the now accepted fact that non-CO2 gases are a major contributor to planetary warming and also enabled the Montreal protocol to become the first successful climate mitigation policy. For this work, he was awarded the 2009 Tyler Prize by Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland. In 1980, Madden and Ramanathan were the first to make a statistical prediction that global warming will be detected above the background noise by 2000, a prediction which was verified by the IPCC in 2001. He led a NASA study with its climate satellite to show that clouds had a net cooling effect on the planet and quantified the radiation interactions with water vapor and its amplification of the CO2 warming. He led international field campaigns, developed unmanned aircraft platforms for tracking brown clouds pollution worldwide. His work has led to numerous policies including the formation of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition by the United Nations to reduce shortlived climate pollutants (HFCs; Methane; Black Carbon and Ozone).

He founded Project Surya with daughters Nithya Ramanathan and Tara Ramanathan to mitigate climate and health impacts of cooking with solid biomass by the poorest three billion. He now leads a University of California wide climate education protocol to educate over one million climate champions and warriors: Bending the Curve Climate Solutions.

He was the science advisor to Pope Francis’ holy see delegation to the 2015 Paris climate summit and also advised then-California Governor Jerry Brown. His honors include: the UN Climate Champion in 2013; Election to the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of sciences; Foreign Policy's  2014 thought leader; In 2018, He (with James Hansen) was named the Tang Laureate for sustainability science and in 2021 the Blue Planet Prize.

Research focus

Ramanathan's current research interest is in understanding the human-nature interactions and how these interactions influence climate change and climate actions. He has a new study coming out on this topic in Nature Sustainability, titled: Modeling human-natural systems interactions with implications for 21st-century warming, by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, Yangyang Xu, and Anthony Versaci, In Press, Nature Sustainability.

Teaching focus

Ramanathan is dedicated to creating climate literacy to all adults, college to high school students, and leaders to workers in the private sector. Towards this goal, he led a UC-wide education protocol called Bending the Curve: Climate Solutions, which is taught at all UC campuses, Stockholm university and west Virginia. Over the next two years, he is focused on taking this education protocol to campuses across USA. In parallel he is in discussions with educators to develop a climate literacy program for adults, particularly those who have difficulty in accepting the reality of climate change.