<p>Recent assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change implies that global mean sea level is unlikely to rise more than about 1.1 m within this century, but with further increase beyond 2100, even within the most intensive future anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission scenarios. However, some studies conclude that considerably greater sea level rise could be realized, and experts assign a substantially higher likelihood of such a future. To understand this discrepancy, it would be useful to have scenario independent metrics that can be compared between different approaches. The concept of a transient climate response has proven to be useful to compare the response of climate models. Here, we introduce a similar metric for sea level science. By analyzing mean rate of change in sea level (not sea level itself), we identify a near linear relationship with global mean surface temperature (and therefore accumulated carbon dioxide emissions) in both model projections, and in observations on a century time scale. This motivates us to define the <q>Transient Sea Level Sensitivity</q> as the increase in the sea level rate associated with a given warming in units of m/century/K. We find that model projections fall below extrapolation based on recent observational records. This comparison indicates that the likely upper level of sea level projections in recent IPCC reports would be too low.</p>