A warm consensus, but the planet is not following suit EVERYONE likes a consensus. The word itself has only positive connotations, regardless of the conclusions reached. When the consensus is said to be among experts - rather than the more obviously fallible world of politics - then that's it: opinion is elevated to the status of unchallengeable fact. This is when things can get really dangerous. The most obvious example of the failure of an expert consensus was that among economists ahead of the credit crunch. The public disillusionment was put most pithily by Her Majesty the Queen when she paid a visit to the London School of Economics in November 2008.