Scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan longed for the American dream while growing up in southern India in the 1960s: specifically, a Chevrolet Impala, a muscle car he learned about from his father, a tire salesman.. Ramanathan arrived in the United States in his 20s, but never bought his gas guzzler, largely because his scientific knowledge of global warming quickly eclipsed his income.
Fast forward to the 1970s, and Ramanathan, now a newly minted postdoc in planetary science, was spending his days working as a visiting researcher at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and his evenings on a side project he hid from his supervisors. His solitary nighttime research would end up changing the way scientists viewed global warming.
The young scientist had discovered that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, then widely used in the manufacture of refrigerators, air conditioning units and spray cans, had a significant greenhouse effect. Ramanathan had briefly encountered these industrial chemicals at his first job at a refrigeration company. Like carbon dioxide, CFCs trapped heat in the atmosphere. In fact, Ramanathan’s calculations suggested, they were more powerful: one CFC molecule could have the same warming effect as up to 10,000 carbon dioxide molecules. For three months, he repeated the calculations looking for an alternative explanation. It didn’t find any.
“I was just an immigrant postdoc from India. I didn’t know if I should tell NASA about it or not. I just sent the paper,” Ramanathan recalled.
The journal Science published the findings, and his work made the front page of The New York Times in 1975. The idea that CFCs could be such a powerful force in global warming was also met with disbelief, not least from Ramanathan himself, who embarked on the project purely out of curiosity at a time when climate change was not a pressing concern.
Finally, Ramanathan established the now widely accepted fact that greenhouse gases other than CO2 are major contributors to global warming, vital knowledge that underpinned the first successful climate mitigation policy.
Ramanathan in the mid-1970s, when he was working at NASA, where he made his first scientific discovery. – Courtesy of Veerabhadran Ramanathan
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Thursday awarded Ramanathan, a distinguished research professor at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the prestigious Crafoord Prize, which for some winners was a harbinger of a Nobel Prize.
“It broadened our view of how humanity affects the composition of the atmosphere, climate and air quality, and how the three interact,” said Ilona Riipinen, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Stockholm University in Sweden and a member of the committee that awarded the prize, which is worth 8 million Swedish kroner (about $900,000).
Ramanathan, 81, is now a distinguished research professor of climate and atmospheric sciences at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. – Erik Jepsen
Accidental climatologist
Ramanathan, who studied engineering in Bengaluru, India before moving to the United States, said his first career breakthrough was the result of several happy “accidents” that allowed him to connect the dots between different fields of study.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in engineering, he spent a miserable stint working at a refrigerator company, making sure the refrigerant – CFCs – didn’t leak. When he was 26, he moved to the United States and began a PhD at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in an engineering-related field.
Ramanathan, however, found that his supervisor had unexpectedly shifted focus, and his dissertation ended up detailing the greenhouse effect in Venus’ atmosphere. Then, while working at NASA Langley, he encountered the work of scientists Mario Molina and Frank Rowland. Their research showed that CFCs depleted ozone, a natural gas in the atmosphere that protects people from cancer-causing radiation. (Dup later won the Nobel Prize in 1995.) It wasn’t until the 1980s that CFCs generally became an issue of public concern.
Before his investigation in 1975, Ramanathan said he was not at all concerned about climate change. However, as he and others expanded the list of trace gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, that contributed to the greenhouse effect, Ramanathan became deeply concerned that global warming would manifest much sooner than the prevailing thinking at the time. A paper he co-authored in 1985 concluded that trace gases are potentially as important as CO2 for long-term global warming.
“That had a big impact. The whole climate community woke up and said, ‘Wait a minute. Global warming is coming twice as fast as we thought. It’s not going to be your kids’ problem. It’s your problem now,'” said Spencer Weart, historian of science and author of “Discovering Global Warming.” He is a former director of the Center for the History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics.
“It’s great for Ramanathan to get some of the attention he deserves,” he added.
Ramanathan and others have argued that CFCs’ potential for global warming gave reason to restrict production. The 1987 Montreal Protocol eventually banned the use of CFCs, though largely because of heightened scientific and public concern about their health impacts following the discovery in 1985 of a hole in the ozone layer. Without the ban, the world could have seen an additional warming of up to 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a 2021 study in the journal Nature.
The greenhouse effect of CFCs and gases in the past was only one part of the puzzle. In his long career, Ramanathan deployed satellites, balloons, drones and ships to directly study the Earth’s atmosphere, confirming with direct observations what climate models had only suggested.
Ramanathan used drones and other instruments to measure atmospheric brown clouds, a layer of air pollution. – NASA
Its key discoveries include showing for the first time that clouds have a cooling effect on the planet and understanding how water vapor can amplify the warming effects of carbon dioxide. He also led a project that observed and measured a 3-kilometer (about 2 miles) thick cloud of air pollution that covered much of the Indian subcontinent. His work on atmospheric brown clouds showed that air pollution masked some of the effects of global warming, a complicated dynamic that scientists are still untangling today.
Ramanathan became a member of the council of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2012, advising three consecutive popes on climate change policy, an experience he said made him consider not only the science but also the ethical implications of the climate crisis, which he stressed would disproportionately affect the poor.
“His quiet but effective way of communicating was key to engaging both the research community and policy makers,” said Örjan Gustafsson, professor of biogeochemistry at Stockholm University and member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences who worked with Ramanathan.
“With an eye for the most vulnerable on our planet and an ear for younger researchers, he inspired a whole generation of climate scientists.”
Ramanathan (left) with Pope Francis and other researchers after a joint workshop of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in 2014 at the Vatican. – Lorenzo Rumors
Ramanathan, now 81, drives a Tesla Model Y (though a red model of a Chevy Impala adorns his fireplace) and has converted his California home to solar power, but has given up walking and taking the bus to work because, he said, it took too long.
He noted that he rarely advises individual actions to combat the climate crisis. Instead, Ramanathan encourages the young people he meets to “stand up and elect the right politicians” and spread the word “using data-driven science, not junk.”
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