Anyone who uses the argument that there is a "consensus" on a scientific topic in order to stop debate is demonstrating a fundimental lack of understanding of the scientific method. Science is not a popularity contest, and just because more people believe something does not make it correct; in fact, many of the most important scientific discoveries were in contrast to the popular beliefs of the day.
An interesting thing to me is that while the global warming alarmists are preventing debate in order to maintain their "consensus" the global warming skeptics have been looking into the underlying science and expanding our understanding of the climate in order to explain inconsistencies in the alarmists science.
One of the more interesting pieces of data has been related to sunspot activity; in comparison to all other datasets the sunspot activity has matched global temperature variations far more closely. This (of course) has been ignored until recently because sun spots do not increase solar irradiance so no one could explain why this would have such an impact on temperature; that is until recently ...
Henrik Svensmark discovered that the type of radiation released from sunspots has a direct impact on the formation of clouds in our environment. Being that we're in a 1000 year high in terms of sunspot activity ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3869753.stm ) you'd think that this would have been big news ...
Unfortunately, science is inconvenient when you're trying to maintain a consensus on a scientific topic
