You bet.
I don't have a great set of credentials. I have been doing this for a long time. I'm a registered professional biologist, and I've now written 17 scientific papers that have been published. As a result, Simon Fraser University is giving me an honorary doctorate of science in June.
I've often apologized for my credentials, but Dr. Daniel Pauly, who is one of the best-known scientists in the world and a fishery scientist, told me not to do that. He said, “If you are doing science and it is being published, it has undergone peer review; people with credentials are examining and picking apart your work, particularly controversial work”--as in the case of the science paper, where we actually predicted an extinction. That was an uncomfortable thing for the journal to consider. So they took our data and sent it to Dr. Ray Hilborn, who's also one of the more illustrious scientists on fisheries in the world. He ran the data and got the same results we did.
That is how people attack me--with my credentials--but the science stands. It has now been replicated around the world by my colleagues from many universities, including the University of Alberta.