Well, yes, the pole does shift around slowly all of the time. There was a news story Last year about the north magentic pole heading off into the Arctic Ocean (it has been in northern Canada in historic times) and they think it will go all the way to Russia.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/03/20/north.pole/
You can see a nice map of its drift during the time its location has been known at this page:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2...neticfield.htm
But the 'reversal' is something completely different than the usual drift. It's probably true that we won't see this flip occur in our lifetimes and that is all that 'really matters' for the pedestrian sort of person who doesn't read SciFi and speculate for themselves all the time like we 4X gamers do.
