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Solar radiation management schemes could potentially alleviate the impacts of global warming. One such scheme could be to brighten the surface of the ocean by increasing the albedo and areal extent of bubbles in the wakes of existing shipping. Here we show that ship wake bubble lifetimes would need to be extended from minutes to days, requiring the addition of surfactant, for ship wake area to be increased enough to have a significant forcing. We use a global climate model to simulate brightening the wakes of existing shipping by increasing wake albedo by 0.2 and increasing wake lifetime by ×1440. This yields a global mean radiative forcing of −0.9 ± 0.6 Wm⁻² (−1.8 ± 0.9 Wm⁻² in the Northern Hemisphere) and a 0.5°C reduction of global mean surface temperature with greater cooling over land and in the Northern Hemisphere, partially offsetting greenhouse gas warming. Tropical precipitation shifts …