[dawg-]

You are missing something really important though. Those kind of claims usually start with the phrase, "If X continues at the current rate..."

Just in the last few years we (in the U.S. at least) reached the lowest rates of smoking ever recorded, which surely accounts for the lower rate of deaths at least in part.

The CDC in the 90's couldn't have known how effective the aggressive campaign against smoking would end up being over the next 20 years. They had to make a prediction based on the rates of smoking they had at the time, and that's really all you can ever do.

Are you suggesting that we shouldn't try to predict anything because what if we're wrong?