About 91% of the excess heat from anthropogenic climate change has been absorbed and stored in the ocean, causing warming of the global ocean and contributing to about half of the global mean sea level rise through thermal expansion. Ocean warming is not spatially uniform, with some hotspot regions of substantial warming but others of negligible warming or even cooling. In this study, surface forcing perturbation experiments are conducted using a global ocean model to understand non-uniform ocean warming patterns and changes in meridional ocean heat transport (OHT) under a transient climate change scenario with gradual CO₂ increase. Our results reveal the dominance of surface heat uptake in the Southern Ocean through passive transport by the climatological overturning circulation, while wind changes dominate both mean circulation and eddy responses in the mid-latitude peak warming region. Outside the Southern Ocean, the ocean warming patterns are determined by the heat flux forcing through the anomalous southward OHT primarily due to the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, except in the subpolar North Atlantic where the weakened gyre circulation dominates and the parameterized eddy processes compensate about half of the OHT divergence. Further north, the enhanced poleward OHT into the Arctic is largely passive. By distinguishing contributions from different surface forcing and OHT processes, our analysis provides important insight into the formation of regional ocean warming patterns.