I don't know. I think the phrase still has a quite a bit of usefulness. The point is to communicate to the public that many people whose job it is to research s

I don't know. I think the phrase still has a quite a bit of usefulness. The point is to communicate to the public that many people whose job it is to research such a thing agree. I also disagree that consensus has any implication with democracy. It's a word used for general agreement, and in my experience democracies are rarely in agreement. How else would you tell people that most scientists agree on a position? Also, even if a lone outsider challenged the new data, that's not something you communicate to the public yet. Policy and publicity would need to wait until consensus actually did occur because at that point, the legitimacy of the science would have been worked out. This terminology is ancient and has been used long before climate change debate.