The non-spherical symmetric and exact thermal evolution model is used to calculate the transient thermal response to pulsar glitches. The three ways of energy release originated from glitches, namely the ‘shell’, ‘ring’ and ‘spot’ cases are compared. The ‘ring’ case is always the middle one in terms of the response time, the response duration and the intensity of the response. Taking the relativistic light bending effect and the rotational effect into consideration, the X-ray light curves resulting from the thermal response to the glitches are calculated. Only the ‘spot’ case produces modulative X-rays. Different sets of parameters result in different evolution patterns of light curves. This is thus a good method to determine the equations of state for pulsars.