Impacts of sea level rise on coastal planning in Norway

•Sea levels are oscillating with important multidecadal periodicities.•Sea levels are not presently positively accelerating worldwide.•Sea levels are presently decreasing in Norway and not positively accelerating.•Sea level rises from 16 to 116 cm by 2100 in Norway are unrealistic.•Most likely predictions of SLR by 2100 are linear fittings of more than 60 yr of data.

This paper shows that despite today's most popular climate models indicating that sea levels are generally rising and accelerating and that the coastal management in Norway may face sea level rises from 16 to 116 cm by the year 2100, all the local and global tide gauges and the satellite radar altimeter reconstruction of global mean sea level consistently show that there is no accelerating behaviour, with negative sea level rises for the specific of Norway because of the post-glacial rebound. This suggests the sea level rise of this century will very likely be the one from the past century.