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.

[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.

This was done using the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), which showed that clouds have a large cooling effect on the planet.

While atmospheric brown clouds partially offset the warming due from carbon dioxide, their effect on agriculture has been less certain.

[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] 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.

An estimated 440,000 deaths per year are attributed to unsanitary food preparation techniques due to aerosol exposure.

Each household in the village of Khairatpur, Uttar Pradesh received a biomass cook stoves and a solar lamp.

[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."