First of all, if science needs "belief," then it isn't science; It's just another religion. Science is about testing a hypothesis against experiments, and examining the data. Belief is a acceptance of something to be true (or false) in the absence of evidence.

Second, "consensus" doesn't mean jack in science. Science is advanced by questioning the consensus, and then overturning it.

I'll give a couple of examples of consensus not being science:

1. In 1911, there was rapid consensus around the Rutherford model of the atom, which was an advancement of the Thompson model of the atom. They had experimental evidence that the atom was mostly open space, with a dense core, and electrons orbiting around the core. After the Thompson model of the atom, which didn't have much in the way of experimental evidence to support it, the Rutherford model had actual experimental evidence that was consistent with the theory.

Ah, but there was more data to gather, and only a few years later, another physicist, Niels Bohr, proposed a model that added to the Rutherford model the idea that electrons not only orbit the core, as in the Rutherford model, but do so in very explicit shells of different energy levels. The Rutherford model was quickly discarded, the prior consensus was overturned.

2. In the 1890's, physicists thought that most everything that we could discover pretty much had been, and new physical theories would be tested by improvement in measurement "in the sixth decimal place." A few years later, guys like Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Dirac, et al overturned most everything we knew about physics (and some concepts in chemistry as well).

Today, we have misbegotten consensus in science that diverts and wastes huge amounts of money. AGW is one such fruitless field, another is string theory, another consensus coming under question is the "plaque" theory for dementia.  

If you want to see how bankrupt the field of science has become, you need do little more than go to this website:

https://retractionwatch.com/

and start reading. It isn't just science that is corrupted, it is also engineering, medicine, biology, you name it. The IEEE, (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers), where I was once a member, has had to cease publication of entire journals because the numbers of papers that they had to retract numbered in the hundreds over a period of years.

We have a crisis in science in the US, and it isn't a result of laymen spouting nonsensical theories. This crisis is the result of deliberate and extended fraud in search of fame and funding by credentialed 'scientists.'