Al Gore can rest on his laurels or take time out and run for President, because I have single-handedly discovered the key to global warming: Residents of New York City live in apartments and work in office buildings that are warm enough to melt the cheese on a foccacia. I can only extrapolate that their thin-skinned brethren in other wintry cities around the world also turn the heat up higher than the median temperature in all those balmy places they think they'd like to visit in March - like my home town, Los Angeles.
Who turns out to be the hardier species after all? Perhaps it's those of us on the west coast who aren't afraid of a little morning chill, or who bridge the gap between an environmentally-friendly 68 degrees, say, and a skin-parching 74 by putting on a sweatshirt and a pair of socks instead of turning up the thermostat. Have you east coast folks not noticed those cute little hoodies at all the retail chains? They work just as well as a furnace, a few of the politically-correct ones aren't made under desperate conditions overseas, and they don't use up fossil fuels.
I know what you're going to say - I live in Los Angeles, so I don't know what real meteorological suffering is all about. But I have credentials: I grew up in Chicago; I stood at the bus stop and watched my friend's knees turn blue; I felt the snot in my nose freeze if I stayed out too long. I know what it's like not to be able to feel your pinky fingers and pinky toes, and still have four more blocks to walk.
Nobody's asking you to turn the heat off completely, though on one recent sauna-like New York evening I did exactly that, climbed under the down comforter, and remained comfortable until morning thanks to the banked heat in the place where I was staying. But what would happen if you - or your building, if you live in a place with central heating - turned the heat down to 70 daytime and 66 when you go to bed? Out in hardy SoCal, they ask us to keep the temperature even lower than that - our house registers closer to 68 in the daytime, and we turn the heat off at night - but we know you're new to struggle, so we'll take it one parched step at a time.
The consequences for the economy may be profound, given that less heat requires less emollients of all kinds, from lip balm to extra-strength hand cream to full-body moisturizer, to turn your own personal Mojave back into a balanced ecosystem. Sales of room humidifiers will plummet, and moisture-replenishing bath oils will go the way of the electric typewriter. Perhaps the coming new administration will have to support skin-care companies with the equivalent of farm subsidies. It's a small price to pay to guarantee the survival of polar bears and penguins and the ice cap they call home, to say nothing of liberating Gore from his day job just when we might need him most.