Status RED:

1. Falling water tables and water scarcity across the world
2. The allure of the American lifestyle, which is a huge burden on the planet when 300 million live it, and will cause utter collapse if 7 billion keep attempting to adopt it
3. Food: the horrors of the industrial scale factory farming and food production that will be required to feed 9 billion people in a decade or two are unimaginable. People are experimenting with things like lab-grown meat for this.
4. Collapsing birth rates: the cost of raising a child in affluent societies has skyrocketed, and the ratio of people who need to be supported by society (retirees, disabled) to the working population has fallen from about 1:16 to less than 1:4. Productivity gains have helped delay the impact, but this is industrial age Taylorist human-cog productivity gains. As we move to post-Taylorist labor economics based on lifestyle design, productivity gains will initially plateau and then collapse, if measured in the usual sense. The piper will have to be paid.

Status YELLOW:

1. Global warming: not because it isn't important, but because the window of opportunity to meaningfully arrest it is mostly gone. It's now time to pay. All we can do is plan for the fallout, like having a damage control plan ready for low-lying countries like Bangladesh.
2. Peak oil: again, important, but the main moves have been made, and we can only watch to see how things play out. I am betting it will be ugly.
3. Consumerism: for lack of a better word. This is what is making us all too stupid to solve any of the other problems. We are all fiddling while Rome burns, en masse and democratically, instead of just Nero in his palace. The worse things get, the more we distract ourselves with iPhones and Foursquare mayorships.

There are a few major weapons that still haven't been unleashed against these problems. Clay Shirky's "cognitive surplus" is one of them, but rapidly running out due to the aging of the population in the rich countries... the poor in the less developed world don't have as much surplus, and most of it will go towards solving local problems... and it's NOT all local. A heart-warming little micro-finance fueled story of local self-sustainability does nothing to manage the fallout of Peak Oil for example.

It may all be too little too late. I am betting on Collapsonomics being the major world dynamic starting in about 15 years. The probability of the Singularity happening and saving us is very low, and the probability of it being benevolent is even lower.

And no, we can't tweet and share and collaborate and Kumbaya our way out of these problems. Resources and astounding breakthroughs are needed.