The pressure of human activity, with eutrophication, hypoxia, pollutant discharges, overfishing, shoreline encroachment and altered water and sediment discharge, had been concentrated for most of the twentieth century in the developed or densely populated areas of the world. There were still underwater havens in remote areas of the ocean that, while not spared from atmospheric inputs of pollutants and nutrients, remained largely untouched, such as some islands in the Pacific or parts of the polar oceans. One might have thought it possible to protect some particularly rich areas in which to preserve the marine ecosystems that were being lost from the rest of the ocean, such as the Great Barrier Reef or the great Tubbataha Atoll in the Sulu Sea in the Philippines, a mythical place that I have wanted to visit, without succeeding so far, for years. A growing pressure threatens to dash this hope: climate change, which is proving to be the pressure capable of delivering the coup de grace to many of the ocean’s ecosystems, a threat so global that no place on the planet, no matter how remote or protected, can escape the impact of climate change and the increase in CO2 concentration that drives it.