Ocean heat is concentrated near the surface because warm water is less dense than cold. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that heat moves to a cold sink however and the destination of least resistance for tropical heat is the poles where it melts the icecaps. Cyclones are often the transport mechanism for this movement and they and sea level rise have been identified by the IPCC as the greatest risks of climate change. Heat pipes can bypass the physical resistance to benign heat movement into the deep because they utilize phase changes of a working fluid to move heat from the high pressure evaporator end of the pipe to the low pressure condensing end where the latent heat of condensation is dispersed into the cold sink. It takes seconds to move surface heat to an ocean depth of 1000 meters whereas it takes as long as 350 years to diffuse there naturally. By placing a turbine hooked to a generator in the vapor stream mechanical and electrical energy can be produced. Estimates are the oceans have the potential to produce between 14 and 25 terawatts of power with ocean thermal energy conversion. Due to the low thermal dynamic efficiency of this process, resulting from the small temperature difference between the tropical surface and ocean water at 1000 meters, approximately 20 times more heat has to be moved than power extracted from the system. To produce 14 TW of power therefore 14 TWh would be converted and an additional 280 TWh would be moved to the depths. The 2010 NOAA study of John Lyman et al. estimated the oceans are accumulating 330 TWh each year so virtually all of this could be moved to the deep where it “would have virtually zero impact” or be converted to productive use. The coefficient of expansion of sea water at 1000 meters is half that of the tropical surface thus there is an additional sea level benefit from this process over and above the short-circuiting of heat movement towards the poles. Due to the negligible temperature increase of the water at depth there would be little change in the density of the water so it would take many years for the heat to migrate back to the surface. A paper submitted to the 2012 American Geophysical Union conference by Norm Rogers, suggests the rate of diffusion is about 4 meters/year. As James Hansen et al. put it in the 2010 paper Earth’s energy imbalance and implications – “The rate of ocean heat uptake determines the planetary energy imbalance, which is the most fundamental single measure of the state of Earth’s climate.” We need to increase the uptake of the deeper ocean.