In this paper we extend to the difference case the notion of Poisson-Lichnerowicz cohomology, an object encapsulating the building blocks for the theory of deformations of Hamiltonian operators. A local scalar difference Hamiltonian operator is a polynomial in the shift operator and its inverse, with coefficients in the algebra of difference functions, endowing the space of local functionals with the structure of a Lie algebra. Its Poisson-Lichnerowicz cohomology carries the information about the center, the symmetries and the admissible deformations of such algebra. The analogue notion for the differential case has been widely investigated: the first and most important result is the triviality of all but the lowest cohomology for first order Hamiltonian differential operators, due to Getzler. We study the Poisson-Lichnerowicz cohomology for the operator K0 = S − S −1 , which is the normal form for (−1, 1) order scalar difference Hamiltonian operators; we obtain the same result as Getzler did, namely H p (K0) = 0 ∀p > 1, and explicitly compute H 0 (K0) and H 1 (K0). We then apply our main result to the classification of lower order scalar Hamiltonian operators recently obtained by