Veerabhadran Ramanathan

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Veerabhadran Ramanathan
Veerabhadran Ramanathan.jpg
Portrait of Veerabhadran Ramanathan
Born (1944-11-24) 24 November 1944 (age 77) [1]
Chennai, Madras Presidency, British India
Alma mater Annamalai University
IISc
Stony Brook
Awards  Buys Ballot Medal
  Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal
  Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement
  BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
  Tang Prize
Scientific career
Fields Atmospheric Scientist
Institutions Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Doctoral advisor Robert Cess
Website ramanathan.ucsd.edu

Veerabhadran "Ram" Ramanathan (born 24 November 1944) is Edward A. Frieman Endowed Presidential Chair in Climate Sustainability Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. He has contributed to many areas of the atmospheric and climate sciences including developments to general circulation models, atmospheric chemistry, and radiative transfer. He has been a part of major projects such as the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX) and the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), and is known for his contributions to the areas of climate physics, Climate Change and atmospheric aerosols research. He is now the Chair of Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions education project of University of California. He has received numerous awards, and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has spoken about the topic of global warming, and written that "the effect of greenhouse gases on global warming is, in my opinion, the most important environmental issue facing the world today." [2]

Contents

Due to his close affiliation with Pope Francis, Ramanathan has been described as "The Pope's climate scientist". He was influential in the creation of Laudato si', the Pope's encyclical on climate change. [3]

Background and education

Ramanathan was born in Chennai, India. At the age of 11, he moved with his family to Bangalore. The classes at the school he attended were taught in English, and not his native Tamil. He admits that he "lost the habit of listening to my teachers and had to figure out things on my own". [4] He received his BE degree from Annamalai University, and ME degree from the Indian Institute of Science.[ citation needed ] In 1970, he arrived in the US to study interferometry at the State University of New York at Stony Brook under the direction of Robert Cess.[ citation needed ] Before Ramanathan could begin working on his PhD research, Cess decided to change his research and focus on planetary atmospheres.[ citation needed ]

Research and publications

Atmospheric brown clouds in northeastern India and Bangladesh as seen from space Aerosol-India.jpg
Atmospheric brown clouds in northeastern India and Bangladesh as seen from space

Ramanathan has contributed to many areas of the atmospheric sciences. His first major findings were in the mid-1970s and were related to the greenhouse effect of CFCs and other trace gases [5] [6] Until that time, carbon dioxide was thought to be the sole greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. He also contributed to the early development of global circulation models [7] and the detecting and attribution of climate change. [8]

His focus then shifted to the radiative effects of clouds on the climate. This was done using the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), which showed that clouds have a large cooling effect on the planet. [9] [10] ERBE was also able to measure the greenhouse effect without the use of climate models. [11]

Recently, he has published on the aerosol radiative properties. His work has shown that aerosols have a cooling effect on the surface of the planet, and at the top of the atmosphere, but the forcing at the top of the atmosphere was only one-third the magnitude as the surface forcing. This has implications for the hydrologic cycle. [12] While working on the Central Equatorial Pacific Experiment, he discovered that absorbing black carbonaceous aerosols have a larger influence on climate than previously thought, which led to the development of the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX). [13] In the 1990s, he led the Indian Ocean Experiment with Paul Crutzen and discovered the widespread existence of atmospheric brown clouds covering much of the Indian Ocean region. They found that the vast majority of the aerosols were anthropogenic in origin, and that the surface cooling caused by the aerosols is more important than the atmospheric heating. [14] These atmospheric brown clouds may have masked as much as 50% of the surface heating caused by the increase in carbon dioxide, and caused reduced precipitation during the Indian monsoon. [15]

Ramanathan is also interested in the impact of climate change on agriculture in India. While atmospheric brown clouds partially offset the warming due from carbon dioxide, their effect on agriculture has been less certain. A statistical rice model couple to a regional climate model has shown that reductions of both carbon dioxide and atmospheric brown clouds will increase crop yield. [16]

He has also written on avoiding dangerous anthropogenic climate change. Ramanathan writes that there are several tipping points in the climate system, and that they do not all occur at the same temperature threshold; the tipping point for the arctic summer sea ice is likely to be smaller than that for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. While the planet has seen an observed warming of 0.6 °C since pre-industrial times, it has already most likely committed itself to 2.4 °C (1.4 °C to 4.3 °C) of warming. These values surpass several of the tipping point thresholds. [17] In a 2014 paper, Ramanathan and co-authors suggested that mitigating methane, soot, ozone and hydrofluorocarbons in the atmosphere could reduce the expected sea level rise due to climate change. [18]

Project Surya

In March 2007, Ramanathan wrote a white paper with Balakrishnan on a potential project that will reduce air pollution and global warming. [19] Project Surya, which means Sun in Sanskrit, will use inexpensive solar cookers in rural India, and document the reductions in carbon dioxide and soot emissions. The byproducts of biofuel cooking and biomass burning are significant contributors to global warming, and the expanded use of renewable energy is expected to decrease their effects.

The burning of solid fuels causes substantial health risks as well. An estimated 440,000 deaths per year are attributed to unsanitary food preparation techniques due to aerosol exposure. [20] Over 3 billion people cook and heat their home by burning biomass such as wood and feces. The project, costing an estimated $4.5 million, will buy 3,500 cookers and impact up to 15,000 people. As of November 2008, the project has not been funded. [21]

Project Surya was soft launched in March 2009. Each household in the village of Khairatpur, Uttar Pradesh received a biomass cook stoves and a solar lamp. Surya has since received $150,000 in funding from UNEP. [22]

Honors and awards

Ramanathan is an ISI highly cited researcher. [23] He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Society and American Geophysical Union. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. [24] In 1995, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him the Buys Ballot Medal. [25] In 2002, he was awarded the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal, "... for fundamental insights into the radiative roles of clouds, aerosols and key gases in the Earth's climate system." He was elected a member of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2002 "... for fundamental contributions to our modern understanding of global climate change and human impacts on climate and environment", [26] an Academician of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2004, a member the American Philosophical Society in 2006, [27] and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2008. [28] Also, Veerabhadran Ramanathan has been bestowed with the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award 2015 in the Climate Change category for discovering that human-produced gases and pollutants other than CO2 have a huge power to alter the Earth's climate, and that by acting on them it is possible to make a short-term dent on the rate of global warming. He received the prestigious Tang Prize for Sustainable Development in 2018. He was awarded the 90th annual Mendel Medal by Villanova University in 2018 for his work on climate change. [29] Ramanathan is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award (Champions of the Earth) in 2013. [30]

Articles

Related Research Articles

Attribution of recent climate change Effort to scientifically ascertain mechanisms responsible for recent global warming

Attribution of recent climate change is the effort to scientifically ascertain mechanisms responsible for recent global warming and related climate changes on Earth. The effort has focused on changes observed during the period of instrumental temperature record, particularly in the last 50 years. This is the period when human activity has grown fastest and observations of the atmosphere above the surface have become available. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is "extremely likely" that human influence was the dominant cause of global warming between 1951 and 2010. Likely human contribution is 93%–123% of the observed 1951–2010 temperature change.

Greenhouse effect Atmospheric phenomenon causing planetary warming

The greenhouse effect is a process that occurs when energy from a planet's host star goes through its atmosphere and warms the planet's surface, but the atmosphere prevents the heat from returning directly to space, resulting in a warmer planet. Light arriving from our Sun passes through Earth's atmosphere and warms its surface. The warmed surface then radiates heat, which is absorbed by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Without the natural greenhouse effect, Earth's average temperature would be well below freezing. Current human-caused increases in greenhouse gases trap greater amounts of heat, causing the Earth to grow warmer over time.

Global warming potential (GWP) is the heat absorbed by any greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, as a multiple of the heat that would be absorbed by the same mass of carbon dioxide. GWP is 1 for CO2. For other gases it depends on the gas and the time frame.

Climate variability and change Change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns for an extended period

Climate variability includes all the variations in the climate that last longer than individual weather events, whereas the term climate change only refers to those variations that persist for a longer period of time, typically decades or more. In addition to the general meaning in which "climate change" may refer to any time in Earth's history, the term is commonly used to describe the current climate change now underway. In the time since the Industrial Revolution, the climate has increasingly been affected by human activities that are causing global warming and climate change.

Asian brown cloud

The Indian Ocean brown cloud or Asian brown cloud is a layer of air pollution that recurrently covers parts of South Asia, namely the northern Indian Ocean, India, and Pakistan. Viewed from satellite photos, the cloud appears as a giant brown stain hanging in the air over much of South Asia and the Indian Ocean every year between January and March, possibly also during earlier and later months. The term was coined in reports from the UNEP Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX).

Global cooling Discredited 1970s hypothesis of imminent cooling of the Earth

Global cooling was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation, due to the cooling effects of aerosols or orbital forcing. Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.

Global dimming Reduction in the amount of sunlight reaching Earths surface

Global dimming is the reduction in the amount of global direct irradiance at the Earth's surface that has been observed since systematic measurements began in the 1950s. The effect varies by location, but worldwide it has been estimated to be of the order of a 4–20% reduction. However, after discounting an anomaly caused by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, a very slight reversal in the overall trend has been observed.

Radiative forcing Difference between solar irradiance absorbed by the Earth and energy radiated back to space

Radiative forcing is the change in energy flux in the atmosphere caused by natural or anthropogenic factors of climate change as measured by watts / metre2. It is a scientific concept used to quantify and compare the external drivers of change to Earth's energy balance. System feedbacks and internal variability are related concepts, encompassing other factors that also influence the direction and magnitude of imbalance.

James Hansen American physicist

James Edward Hansen is an American adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is best known for his research in climatology, his 1988 Congressional testimony on climate change that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. In recent years he has become a climate activist to mitigate the effects of global warming, on a few occasions leading to his arrest.

Infrared window

The infrared atmospheric window refers to a region of the Infrared spectrum where there is relatively little absorption of terrestrial thermal radiation by atmospheric gases. The window plays an important role in the atmospheric greenhouse effect by maintaining the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing IR to space. In the Earth's atmosphere this window is roughly the region between 8 and 14 μm although it can be narrowed or closed at times and places of high humidity because of the strong absorption in the water vapor continuum or because of blocking by clouds. It covers a substantial part of the spectrum from surface thermal emission which starts at roughly 5 μm. Principally it is a large gap in the absorption spectrum of water vapor. Carbon dioxide plays an important role in setting the boundary at the long wavelength end. Ozone partly blocks transmission in the middle of the window.

IPCC list of greenhouse gases List of greenhouse gases

This is a list of the most influential long-lived, well-mixed greenhouse gases, along with their tropospheric concentrations and direct radiative forcings, as identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Abundances of these long-lived gases are regularly measured by atmospheric scientists from samples that are collected throughout the world. Since the 1980s, the annual forcing contributions of these gases are also estimated with high accuracy using IPCC-recommended expressions derived from radiative transfer models.

Climate sensitivity Change in Earths temperature caused by changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations

Climate sensitivity is a measure of how much Earth's surface will cool or warm after a specified factor causes a change in its climate system, such as how much it will warm for a doubling in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. In technical terms, climate sensitivity is the average change in global mean surface temperature in response to a radiative forcing, which drives a difference between Earth's incoming and outgoing energy. Climate sensitivity is a key measure in climate science, and a focus area for climate scientists, who want to understand the ultimate consequences of anthropogenic global warming.

Charles David Keeling American scientist (1928-2005)

Charles David Keeling was an American scientist whose recording of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatory confirmed Svante Arrhenius's proposition (1896) of the possibility of anthropogenic contribution to the greenhouse effect and global warming, by documenting the steadily rising carbon dioxide levels. The Keeling Curve measures the progressive buildup of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere.

Black carbon Component of fine particulate matter

Chemically, black carbon (BC) is a component of fine particulate matter. Black carbon consists of pure carbon in several linked forms. It is formed through the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, biofuel, and biomass, and is one of the main types of particle in both anthropogenic and naturally occurring soot. Black carbon causes human morbidity and premature mortality. Because of these human health impacts, many countries have worked to reduce their emissions, making it an easy pollutant to abate in anthropogenic sources.

Solar geoengineering Reflection of sunlight to reduce global warming

Solar geoengineering, or solar radiation modification (SRM) is a type of climate engineering in which sunlight would be reflected back to space to limit or reverse human-caused climate change. It is not a substitute for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but could act as a temporary measure to limit warming while emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced and carbon dioxide is removed. The two most studied methods for SRM are stratospheric aerosol injection and marine cloud brightening.

Stratospheric sulfur aerosols

Stratospheric sulfur aerosols are sulfur-rich particles which exist in the stratosphere region of the Earth's atmosphere. The layer of the atmosphere in which they exist is known as the Junge layer, or simply the stratospheric aerosol layer. These particles consist of a mixture of sulfuric acid and water. They are created naturally, such as by photochemical decomposition of sulfur-containing gases, e.g. carbonyl sulfide. When present in high levels, e.g. after a strong volcanic eruption such as Mount Pinatubo, they produce a cooling effect, by reflecting sunlight, and by modifying clouds as they fall out of the stratosphere. This cooling may persist for a few years before the particles fall out.

Greenhouse gas Gas in an atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range

A greenhouse gas (GHG or GhG) is a gas that absorbs and emits radiant energy within the thermal infrared range, causing the greenhouse effect. The primary greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere are water vapor (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and ozone (O3). Without greenhouse gases, the average temperature of Earth's surface would be about −18 °C (0 °F), rather than the present average of 15 °C (59 °F). The atmospheres of Venus, Mars and Titan also contain greenhouse gases.

Stratospheric aerosol injection Putting particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight to limit global heating

Stratospheric aerosol injection is a proposed method of solar geoengineering to reduce human-induced global warming. This would introduce aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect via global dimming, which occurs naturally from volcanic eruptions. It appears that stratospheric aerosol injection, at a moderate intensity, could counter most changes to temperature and precipitation, take effect rapidly, have low direct implementation costs, and be reversible in its direct climatic effects. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that it "is the most-researched [solar geoengineering] method, with high agreement that it could limit warming to below 1.5°C." However, like other solar geoengineering approaches, stratospheric aerosol injection would do so imperfectly and other effects are possible, particularly if used in a suboptimal manner.

History of climate change science Aspect of the history of science

The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect was first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth's energy balance and climate. Many other theories of climate change were advanced, involving forces from volcanism to solar variation. In the 1960s, the evidence for the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing. Some scientists also pointed out that human activities that generated atmospheric aerosols could have cooling effects as well.

Sreedharan Krishnakumari Satheesh is an Indian meteorologist and a professor at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He holds the chair of the Divecha Centre for Climate Change, a centre under the umbrella of the IISc for researches on climate variability, climate change and their impact on the environment. He is known for his studies on atmospheric aerosols and is an elected fellow of all the three major Indian science academies viz. Indian Academy of Sciences Indian National Science Academy and the National Academy of Sciences, India as well as The World Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards for his contributions to Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences in 2009. He received the TWAS Prize of The World Academy of Sciences in 2011. In 2018, he received the Infosys Prize, one of the highest monetary awards in India that recognize excellence in science and research, for his work in the field of climate change.

References

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