"While any magnetic-field flip would still be thousands of years away...". Sneaky sentence right at the end. Sure the last one happened 700,000 years ago, so it is "soon", the but article made it sound like it was happening tomorrow!
There are a couple of issues here and it is important to be careful about not conflating them. One, is the question of "how long" does a flip take? There is some evidence that it can take as few as 100 years[1], the previous consensus estimate (2004) was about 7000 years[2]. That is important because the faster it happens the more havoc it is likely to cause. If it happens over thousands of years then humans will ada…
Actually the more pressing matter regards animals that employ magnetoreception (birds, bacteria even!) where a change like this might be particularly devastating. This of course assumes that there is not already some undiscovered non-genetic mechanism to help with adjusting, say socially or physiologically. Human technology could adapt in at most a matter of decades, while genetic adaptation would takes orders of magnitude longer.