On Paul Gilding's "The Great Disruption," With a Nod to Eugene Linden's "The Future in Plain Sight"

So I’m a sucker for ‘big vision’ books about the future and the myriad problems we face with climate change and resource depletion, and right now I’m reading Paul Gilding’s The Great Disruption. It manages to be at once peppy and gloomy, which is some kind of accomplishment. I more or less agree with his thesis–that the entire world is in for a major paradigm shift this century. (Although I would also acknowledge that both 19th and 20th centuries saw such shifts.)
Gilding is writing about the usual culprits of Global Warming, economic chaos, and resource depletion, but he waxes a bit rosy on the likelihood of humans overcoming all these problems. I’m at heart an optimist, but I think we honestly can see some dark clouds of human history on the horizon.
A better book than this is Eugene Linden’s The Future in Plain Sight, published in 1998, which warns of problems ahead without seeming alarmist or sugar-coating the story, either. He essentially predicted The Great Recession a decade before it happened. He calls it The Coming Instability, which is not that frightening, but certainly does have its great risks.