[...] while the extra hot weather will ease a bit next week for good chunks of the country, the temperature forecast for the next three months isn't exactly promising, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Scientists haven't calculated if man-made global warming from the burning of fossil fuels is a factor in the current heat wave, but said it has been a factor in most recent ones and a good chance here, too. The high temperature averaged for the Lower 48 states was 92 degrees on both Thursday and Friday, the warmest since June of 2012, said meteorologist Ryan Maue of the private WeatherBell Analytics service. Heat waves like this one "are kinda like the home run statistic in steroid-fueled baseball," University of Georgia meteorology professor Marshall Shepherd said in an email. Sure heat waves always happened naturally (like home runs in baseball) but the statistics are shifting to make them more likely and more frequent within a warmer background climate.