Taylor Swift manages to avoid wildfires destroying her home in Beverly Hills as blazes sweep across 30,000 acres of Los Angeles, laying waste to over 10,000 buildings, displacing over 130,000 and killing at least 16 people.
It’s a small consolation for the billionaire in what has been a devastating situation for everyone in the region as fire departments from across the United States fight tooth-and-nail to keep the infernos under control, of which there are four still ongoing.
The Pacific Palisades fire, which has been one of the largest and most destructive, has been burning since Tuesday, January 7 and is now thought to be spreading to the Brentwood region, where Ben Affleck briefly lived. The fires have been exceptionally hard to fight due to high-speed winds spreading flames and embers.
Other celebrities such as James Woods and Anthony Hopkins have unfortunately had their homes damaged by the scorching heat but as of January 12, Swift’s 10,000-square-foot mansion remains untouched in some good news for her.
On a far lesser note than the immediate humanitarian disaster, local sports have also been affected. The Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers have had to postpone their NBA games, whilst the Los Angeles Rams have had to relocate to Arizona for the NFL Playoffs game against the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday.
Unfortunately not everyone shares the same compassion for their neighbors as the Los Angeles Police Department revealed they’ve arrested people dressing up as firefighters in order to loot homes as robberies also spiral out of control.
Landlords are also capitalizing on the moment to demand extortionate fees for rentals and beds for the night for the massive number of displaced people. One real estate agent told the BBC how some prices have spiked from $13,000-per-month to $23,000-per-month.
Temperatures break 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time
For years, the point of no return for combatting greenhouse gases and climate change has been if the average global temperature of the Earth breaks the 1.5 degrees Celsius (34.7 F) mark, but that had not happened.
That is until the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced 2024 was the first year on record to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels. All 10 of the hottest years in recorded history have happened in the past decade, and only two continents did not see their hottest years.