One of the largest sources of uncertainty in the overall anthropogenic forcing of climate is still the aerosol impact on liquid clouds. Disentangling the various aerosol-cloud interactions helps to improve estimates of the magnitude of global warming in the future. The current study provides the most rigorous method to date in assessing the aerosol radiative effects from satellite observations across the global ocean. The aerosol responses are decomposed into the Twomey effect (cooling due to an increase in cloud-droplet number concentration), and the adjustments of the cloud liquid water path and cloud fraction (often analysed separately) at a near-global scale. The total effective radiative forcing of liquid clouds since 1850 has been found to be negative, with the cloud adjustments larger than the Twomey effect, which was previously thought to be larger.