@business_kid: "I would 'hit the emergency stop button' only if I felt that such a thing actually existed."

And, quite frankly, I don't.

I'm not nearly as "certain" as a bunch of other people seem to be that there is actually a "drastic crisis situation" here, in which weighs the survival of our entire planet. I really don't believe that "the survival of" our magnificent planet any more depends upon "humans" than it did for "dinosaurs."

Yes, yes, I understand "inconvenient correlations." But I'm not going to jump to the conclusion that our planet is actually going to melt down unless we "do something."

Agree

Probably a bit more honest to say:

I do not claim to have an answer to the OP's original question, nor to have an adequate understanding of the complex problem. Like sundialsvcs, I tend to doubt whether any one really understands the whole picture. But from the first law of thermodynamics I can understand that if the oceans are indeed gaining thermal energy, that energy cannot be simply annihilatated. Can it be transformed into another form of energy? Most likely not by current conventional engineering. But to say the world lacks something to cool the oceans with is to miss the whole point. If you convert thermal energy into something else, you obviously don't need to look for something to cool with. And if some brilliant young engineer somewhere can figure out how to convert the oceans excess energy into something more useful, I'm not going to discourage that effort by saying it can't be done.

Meanwhile,
is something everyone can do, whether or not one claims to understand the whole picture, or more humbly admits otherwise. Better to light one little candle than to curse the darkness

From the rest of your post, it's clear that it's your limited understanding of conventional engineering techniques also.

10 foot to water here.
My solar still makes it taste good.
My lawn is green when I pump some water on it for the cost of a pump station.

Own Bicycles. Mutiple ways to get around. I know how to build a wind surfer skate board if needed.

Non of what I do or know means a can beans in China, Russia, Mexico, South America, Texas. Or any other polluters that look at this situation and call out sovereignty over how they will handle it.

So. I just watch.

Good point. There is a crisis coming down the line, but it's for us, not for the planet. All this talk about saving the planet is poppycock. The earth has been through hot times before and is quite capable of surviving them. The problem is that such times are usually marked by a mass extinction event and our species would certainly be included in that. Afterwards, if God didn't decide to bring down the curtain, there would be new life forms but we wouldn't be there to see them.

@Dogpatch The problem with getting energy from oceanic heat is that it is widely diffused, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that diffuse energy can't be concentrated without doing work, which needs energy.

Right, because it's an open system, we can use energy/entropy from outside (e.g., solar power) to solve problems.

It's at least possible theoretically. But it's important to realize that the proposed process doesn't cool down the ocean as a whole (it cools the warmer surface water and warms the cooler deep water). So it's not a solution to global warming in that sense (although it's obviously potentially helpful as a non carbon-emitting power source).

I beg to differ that it's in any way a good point. I think it's pretty obvious that when people talking about saving the "planet", they're not referring to the hunk of rock floating in space. Pretending otherwise seems quite disingenuous to me.

No, what they usually mean is "Gaia", the living planetary system, not just the rocky core on which it is built. And the point I was making is that Gaia can do very well without us and did so in the past for millions of years. She treats mass extinctions as an opportunity to create completely new ecosystems. That was what happened after the catastrophic global warming that ended the Permian era. It killed most life on earth but the survivors went on to create the age of the dinosaurs.

Gaia doesn't need us but we need the services that Gaia provides, so we had better stop mucking about with her systems. Otherwise she might well throw a fever to burn us out, just as we do to burn out pesky viruses.

Well, I doubt that's true, but on the other hand, it's not like I've run a survey on it or anything so you could be right.

(I think the "planet" in "save the planet" usually refers to currently living things on the planet, that is, people are specifically interested in saving existing ecosystems and would not consider the fact that new ones would replace them as any kind of compensation)

Yeah, I'm pretty sure palm trees in Canada and Siberia would kinda ruin the ambience as well as the minor point of how much of the planet would be actually livable by current living things.

Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' back in 2006 made the point about Sea level rise saying that a modest enough rise would give us 100,000,000 climate refugees from places like Shanghai, & Bangladesh. A whole lot of Port cities would vanish.

Add that to reducing livable land area, increasing deserts, and weather even more vicious each year where you'd either get drought or washed away. I think we all know what we're facing into.

Thank you, I was just going to write something to that effect.

This argument is hardly less disingenuous.

Well, I'm glad you came around to acknowledging what all this is really about, in the end.

"And I think to myself ... what a won-der-ful world!"
– Satchmo

Not so wonderful really.
Groundswell Report

Apparently they're forecasting 200 million Climate Refugees by 2050... That's twice what Al Gore forecast in 2006.

The world is still wonderful. It's not hostile. It just doesn't have favorites.