With headlines feeding public suspicion that a new U.N. climate report ignores evidence that global warming stopped (“paused” to the pious) nearly two decades ago, many readers likely already know that “IPCC” means the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Earlier this week in Washington, however, the "NIPCC" -- the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change -- made news with release of the second in a series of its own 1,000-plus-pages counter-report, “Climate Change Reconsidered II.”

Bearing the challenging tagline of “science the U.N. will exclude from its next climate report,” the NIPCC is meant as a counter-weight and a corrective to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, which is being released today.

The NIPCC report “documents the evidence that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not causing a global warming crisis. The report contains thousands of citations to the peer-reviewed literature,” according to a news release.

Those citations should be welcomed by all scientists, regardless of their position on climate change, because the NIPCC authors paid special attention to “contributions that were overlooked by the IPCC or that presented data, discussion, or implications, arguing against the IPCC’s claim that dangerous global warming is occurring, or will occur, from human-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

It’s about time we had opposing scientists’ names and article titles instead of all that worshipful, non-scientific, politically correct consensus nonsense, the pressure-cooked manipulation used to force agreement from colleagues. There may be a smile on their face, but that's because of the dagger at their backs.

Why does the U.N. love consensus anyway? Because it sounds authoritative against critics who remember to follow the money: The 130 developing countries are a solid majority of the 195 governments that fund the IPCC.

They want a big payday funded by wealthier developed nations via climate treaties with hefty wealth transfer clauses to support “sustainable development” — that is, a solar panel on a hut for 40 watts of light, except at night).

By contrast, the NIPCC document was written by a team of 40 scientists and produced by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based libertarian think tank.

Heartland's two-day conference in the nation's capital was co-sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and Robert Gordon, Heritage's senior adviser for strategic outreach.

I asked Gordon how it felt going up against the IPCC. I think he chuckled before he told me, “against the overwhelming force of the UN and national governments, grant-dependent academia and legions of left-leaning think tanks with piles of cash from foundations and corporations, NIPCC and Heartland have just soldiered on.”

He didn’t seem very intimidated. “NIPCC’s report will perhaps be frightening to the status quo. There are some inconvenient truths within it,” he said.

It is to be hoped that NIPCC brings genuine open debate to the “consensus.” Climate change has never been about science, it’s been about politics.

Politics is why the IPCC has found the most ingenious excuses for the lack of warming in recent years: The heat ran away to the sea floor, it’s only right to transfer wealth to the poor even if the science is wrong — and perhaps we’ll even hear that old schoolboy cliché about the dog ate it.

No matter where that heat went, IPCC is determined to keep directing the global economy away from profitable, adventurous “forward” to useless, grim “backward.”

It's simply preposterous to think of the IPCC’s latest report as science. As a policy recommendation, it’s a fraud – “a false representation of a matter of fact.”

The IPCC has nothing to do with facts. The panel's scientists conducted no original research. They don’t know whether they reported facts or not.

They took the words of others on faith. It’s all literature search, selecting research done by others, the kind of thing a lazy professor has his grad students do — go online and Google all the stuff that proves our point and ignore the rest.

Then crunch it through the silicon crystal ball — the computer model that says HOT no matter what you put in it. Ignore the rest.

Thank you, Heartland and NIPPC, for showing us “the rest.”

RON ARNOLD, a Washington Examiner columnist, is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.