Ryan O'Loughlin | philosophy of climate science

Bio

I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Queens College (CUNY) and a faculty member at the CUNY Graduate Center's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. I hold a PhD in Philosophy of Science from Indiana University. 

Mission

People sometimes think that philosophy has little to contribute to science and vice versa. But that's not true. Historically and today the two are intertwined: scientific methods can smuggle in biases and armchair philosophizing can fail in the face of the simplest gathering of empirical data. This is no less true in philosophy of climate science, my primary area of research.  My education in both the geosciences and in philosophy has cultivated a deep appreciation for attending to scientific practice when doing, writing, and teaching philosophy and for being philosophically alert when reading scientific work. 

Research

My work focuses on philosophical analysis of the credibility and the applications of climate models. I regularly visit national climate labs to talk to scientists and sometimes I collaborate with scientists too. 

My current project is called Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: anti-fragility in the complex sciences and beyond. In particular the project addresses these questions: How exactly does learning (or other types of progress) happen via failures or errors in the modeling community? To what extent can the lessons from error and failure in climate modeling generalize? Besides learning, what are the other benefits (if any) to failure in science?  

Lately I've also been thinking more about (1) the role of artificial intelligence in climate science; and (2) the entanglement of science and ethics in debates about solar geoengineering.  

See more at the Research Page. Here's my Google Scholar page.

Teaching

I also strive to present the interrelationship between science and philosophy to my students. One key message is that, to paraphrase John Oliver, while science is imperfect it is vitally important, and is our best means of learning about the world. Learning about the reasoning strategies involved in science can help students think critically (and actively reflect on their own thinking!) which can further help them navigate our world that is all too often filled with misinformation, overblown hype, and AI slop. 

I've designed and taught courses such as: Scientific Reasoning, Climate Justice, Philosophy of Scientific Modeling, Pluralism and Indigenous Knowledge, to name just a few.  More at the Teaching Page.