I think it should be possible in principle... but I had a professor whose casual academic output basically consisted of publishing rebuttals to other academics

I think it should be possible in principle... but I had a professor whose casual academic output basically consisted of publishing rebuttals to other academics who thought they had found an early warning sign (lightning phenomena is a common approach). A particularly amusing one he shared with us was just a case of bad data analysis in Matlab, the author had used 'filter' instead of 'filtfilt' to get their graph and so were trying to derive their results from the distorted phase...