What does "Consensus" mean?

From The Devil's Kitchen, who's all over the Hadley/CRU files like stink on a dog:

The whole of the anthropogenic climate change reporting and response is co-ordinated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which produces substantial reports every few years on the current state of the science and economics.

The last of these reports—Assessment Report 4 (AR4, as it is referred to throughout the emails)—was released in 2007.

The scientific parts of the IPCC's reports have been based heavily on the research and reconstructions produced by The Club—particularly on the temperature reconstructions of Michael Mann and Keith Briffa. These reconstructions (usually involving a hockey stick graph) have been constantly attacked—and usually destroyed—by sceptics such as Steve McIntyre.

What these emails show is that members of The Club have presented, as fact, data which privately they have acknowledged to be, at best, flawed.

Further, many members of The Club are editors of the reports submitted to the IPCC, and the emails show that they have deliberately cherry-picked those that agree with their position—and conspired to discredit or reject those that do not agree with their political position.

The Club has also conspired to suborne journals, and to oust editors of other journals who are perceived as being unsympathetic to their cause. And they have been successful.

The emails show that, whilst claiming that sceptics' papers are not peer-reviewed, The Club have actively and deliberately used blackmail and smears to prevent such peer-review or, when review is unavoidable, to have conspired to skew the review process to discredit their opponents.

All of these actions render the scientific reports produced by the IPCC extremely suspect. At best.

And they most certainly destroy the concept of the "scientific consensus".

As I've been saying, this is terribly damaging to the scientific community, which is why Mann, Jones, and Biffra (at least) will find their careers to be over. The general public may not have an appetite for esoteric scientific disputes, but they will know a corrupt process when they see one.

The process on display here is entirely, and irredeemably corrupt.