In the coverage of the wildfires that have torn through the Los Angeles area this month, you may have seen some familiar faces among the survivors. Prominent celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Adam Brody and Leighton Meester, and Mel Gibson, have had their houses and in some cases their sources of livelihood destroyed. How the rich and famous, in addition to regular Angelenos, have had their lives upended by this natural disaster have been an integral part of the media’s coverage of the fires.

Media coverage has pointed to a litany of reasons for the fires’ intense destructivity, ranging from its potential points of origin to manmade factors like increased urban development. There’s also been a revolution in attribution science — the ability to connect climate change to acute extreme-weather events. In fact, a new scientific analysis out of the University of California Los Angeles published this week concluded that climate change intensified the city’s devastating wildfires. At the same time, it’s unclear if Americans are making the connection between the devastation of the fires and climate change: Although a recent poll conducted by Emerson College found that a majority of respondents identified climate change as a major cause of the fires, CNN reported Americans’ overall concern about climate change hasn’t budged in decades.

Some of the public have expressed a certain amount of schadenfreude about the plight of wealthy Palisades residents, but overall, most celebrities have been met with outpourings of sympathy — as well as sometimes unconventional assistance (this is how a 2010 album from former Hills star Heidi Montag reached the top of the iTunes chart after she and husband Spencer Pratt were displaced after the fires).

Is the focus on celebrities a giant messy distraction, or........

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