A New York Winter Olympics? Research says it could be 'climate risky' decades from now.

As the world watches the display of extraordinary athletic talent taking place in Cortina d’Ampezzo this month, some New Yorkers, including a pair of legislators, are dreaming of a future Winter Olympics in their home state.

But for that glimmer of an idea to even be possible, New York should act in the next few decades, before it gets too warm, according to scholars.

The Olympics Committee now requires aspiring winter hosts to be "climate-reliable" — it has to stay cold and, ideally, covered in real snow.

Daniel Scott, of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and a team of international researchers found that Lake Placid would be reliably cold enough under low and high emission scenarios through 2050. Then over the next few decades, as the plant warms, things get dicey. By 2080, the village slips into the "climate risky" category, which means minimum daily temperatures will likely rise above 32 degrees, and snowpack doesn't reach a foot, even with artificial snow.

That makes Lake Placid one of just four former hosts that remain viable spots for another Olympics through the middle of the century, according to Scott's research. 

Out of 93 possible Olympic hosts' projected temperatures and snowfall under low emissions to high emissions scenarios, by 2050, 45 to 55 would be considered reliable, and 20 to 28 "marginally reliable." The remaining 10 to 28 would be too warm.

The recent, lingering arctic freeze notwithstanding, New York winters are now warmer than they were when Lake Placid was chosen in 1932 and again in 1980. The hosts for the next two competitions have already been chosen — four French towns for 2030 and Salt Lake City for 2034 — so the next open slot is 12 years away, in 2038.

Temperatures by then can be expected to be incrementally higher, and snowpack incrementally lower, as snowfall across the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past few decades.

State Assemb. Robert Carroll (D-Brooklyn), is keen to see Lake Placid and New York City make a bid.

Carroll and former Assembly member Billy Jones from the North Country imagined in an op-ed an opening ceremony in Times Square: "Amid falling ticker-tape snow and shimmering marquee lights, the Olympic flame ignites against the backdrop of the skyline." Madison Square Garden could be used for ice hockey, the Barclays Center for figure skating, and Yankee Stadium for big-air competition.

Those existing venues would help satisfy the other climate-related requirement the International Olympic Committee added for hosts in 2022. Besides being cold enough, the prospective host must have stadiums and other facilities already in place, to avoid large-scale construction (which is heavy on fossil fuels) and to protect open space and local biodiversity.

Snow is another question. Lake Placid had unusually sparse snowfall in the winter of 1980, which required heavy use of mechanical snow machines — the first time artificial snow was used at the Games. Athletes don’t love manmade snow, which creates a harder, denser and therefore more dangerous surface when they fall. Nevertheless it was sprayed on the slopes at Sochi (2014), Pyeongchang (2018), and Beijing (2022), and this month in Cortina.

The best case for an upstate Olympics is to get on the schedule in the next few decades — and to hope for an outlier year, like this one, with plenty of real snow and cold air.