It's not actually junk prediction, though you might call it doom-bait journalism. WHO put climate change related deaths at like 150,000 people annually in the year 2000. Those numbers will obviously go up, which is why they're backed in a lot of studies, but the real rub on reporting here is that they're talking about "over the course of a century". So it's a completely reasonable estimate, it just ignores a lot of nuance like "some countries are having higher population growth so we're not going to just lose 1 billion (though these deaths are theoretically preventable)" but also "the vast majority of these deaths will be concentrated in Southeast Asia and poorer countries."
Yeah, anyone remember "10 in 2010"? You know, where everyone was panicking because there were going to be 10 billion people on Earth in 2010. The best thing anyone can do for their case is to stick to facts.