That was my initial interpretation, too, but no, they simply only reconstructed temperatures for the past 2000 years. It’s likely that it was the hottest summer for much longer than that.
For example, here’s a xkcd (which was certainly created with much less accurate data, but I would assume isn’t completely off the mark), which shows our time as the hottest since the last ice age: https://xkcd.com/1732/
And that ice age started 115,000 years ago, so I guess, that’s why the article also mentions experts saying that certain days and weeks were likely the hottest for 120,000 years.
Yeah, we know things with lower certainty as you go back further. 2000 years is about the limit of dendrochronology, but other techniques give us much longer time periods but without the same on-land spatial or temporal resolution.
That was my initial interpretation, too, but no, they simply only reconstructed temperatures for the past 2000 years. It’s likely that it was the hottest summer for much longer than that.
For example, here’s a xkcd (which was certainly created with much less accurate data, but I would assume isn’t completely off the mark), which shows our time as the hottest since the last ice age: https://xkcd.com/1732/
And that ice age started 115,000 years ago, so I guess, that’s why the article also mentions experts saying that certain days and weeks were likely the hottest for 120,000 years.
Yeah, we know things with lower certainty as you go back further. 2000 years is about the limit of dendrochronology, but other techniques give us much longer time periods but without the same on-land spatial or temporal resolution.